Psychoanalysing Philosophy — Follow-up
My previous article was inspired by one by Paul Austin Murphy. It was not intended to be a direct response to his, but he has been kind enough to reply with some observations and criticisms (here and here). So, before carrying on with the rest of the series, I’ll respond to them. I’ll summarise the debate and refer extensively to his criticisms, so there’s no need to read what has preceded.
The general topic is the possibility of hidden, unconscious motivations in philosophers, and more generally what leads anyone to believe the things they do. Murphy has said that he disagrees with just about everything I say, which is very interesting for me, because I usually agree with his criticisms of other philosophers. I will therefore need to defend my position carefully.
I wrote that “it’s important to understand what might lead anyone, not just philosophers, to adopt a certain worldview, or for that matter any kind of viewpoint or attitude”. Murphy has responded that it’s not all that important when doing philosophy, and that it all depends on what one thinks philosophy is. I accept his point that it may be even more important if studying the psychology of philosophers but, in general terms, I take philosophy to be an attempt to get to the truth about deep issues. It is of course possible to judge the quality of the argument without reference to the psychology of the person making it; as Murphy says, “the philosophy or idea still stands on its own”, and “discovering unconscious factors is not philosophy”. Agreed — that would be psychology or psychoanalysis. However, if it can be shown that any argument is faulty because of the philosopher’s psychology, then this seems to me to be a useful contribution to the philosophical debate.
Murphy asks for specific claims about Freudianism or Jungianism. The reason I originally mentioned Freud and Jung was simply because they believed that the unconscious is very deep, complex, and hard to unravel, therefore that their ideas are relevant to the current discussion. I specifically mentioned repression, projection, denial, illusion, displacement, rationalisation, self-deception, as factors which might need to be taken into account when assessing anyone’s statements about anything, whether philosophical or not. So I think that I have already made specific claims, which Murphy is free to address. Does he believe that these are real psychological phenomena and relevant to our debate?
Murphy thinks that there is a contradiction if I criticise philosophers for failing to uncover unconscious factors, since it is clearly not possible to examine what is actually unconscious. The last point is clearly true. However, my complaint was against those philosophers who accept uncritically ideas which appear in their consciousness, without any attempt to understand how they arrived there. I was therefore advocating self-analysis (introspection) as an essential tool in a philosopher’s armoury. Murphy says that “unconscious factors may become conscious factors, and then philosophers probably will examine them”. But how does he think they will become conscious, if not by a process of self-analysis? They will not appear by magic, and will surely not persuade the conscious mind of philosophers unless they have conducted the process themselves, and have recognised the flaws in their own thinking.
When I said that “materialists (may) have an emotional reaction to anything which contradicts their underlying preconceptions, which then manifests itself as a logical argument”, Murphy argues that this “can be said about literally any philosophical position”. Indeed. I did not actually intend to single out materialists for this criticism; it’s just that they seem especially and frequently culpable of this fault. I do, however, disagree that “Philip Goff has an emotional reaction to materialism”. On the contrary, Goff’s panpsychism seems to me to be based exclusively on logic, something along these lines: materialism is completely incapable of solving the Hard Problem of consciousness, therefore an alternative explanation has to be sought, and the simplest alternative is that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of matter. I don’t detect any emotional reaction there.
Murphy thinks that materialism is no more interesting in the context of unconscious motivations than dualism, panpsychism, anti-materialism, and religious viewpoints. I would need further clarification on what he means. I can see no unconscious motivation for believing in dualism; most members of the public believe that thoughts/consciousness are of a different nature to matter — it seems obvious. Philosophers and neuroscientists, however, reject dualism because they cannot understand how the two, when apparently so different, can interact so closely. It’s possible, however, that they haven’t thought deeply enough, and that further discoveries will solve the problem in the future. (I apologise if this sounds something like Promissory Dualism. While I believe that dualism is not the ultimate truth, I do think that it can be a useful stepping stone in the ongoing argument against materialism.)
Anti-materialism (spirituality, for example) and religious viewpoints are more complicated. Some of these are undoubtedly not based on evidence, and are therefore faith-based, in which case one can seek the underlying (perhaps unconscious) psychological motivations. Others are based on actual experiences, in which case there are good, conscious reasons for the beliefs. A simple example would be belief in life after death. Some people may believe because they emotionally resist the thought that death is the end; their belief would therefore be a form of wish-fulfilment. However, if someone has had a near-death experience, in which they have left their body, gone through a life- review, journeyed down a long tunnel, emerged into a blinding light, met and conversed with dead relatives or other non-physical beings, who have told them that their time is not yet, and that they must return to their body, then it is unreasonable to suggest that their belief in life after death is unconsciously motivated, since it is based on an actual powerful experience. The best explanations, philosophical or otherwise, are considered to be the most parsimonious (Occam’s Razor). The simplest explanation is that such an experience is real; materialists have the difficult task of explaining how the brain is capable of generating such convincing, but illusory, experiences.
I said that materialism stands behind and drives the worldviews of Existentialism, scientific philosophies like neo-Darwinism and Behaviourism, and political philosophies like Marxism and Communism. Murphy responds that this shows how broad materialism can be, and that it will therefore be difficult to make any generalisations about unconscious motivations. I agree. Rather than make generalisations, it is necessary to examine and analyse each of these separately. That was indeed my intention for future articles, as stated at the end of the previous one: “I’ll offer some of my own thoughts, from a psychoanalytical perspective, on some of the better known philosophies”. I will indeed turn my attention to that discussion.
Murphy wonders whether religion and spiritualism stand behind panpsychism, Cartesianism, and my own position. On panpsychism, it depends how you understand that term, since there are different versions of it. I think that there is nothing religious or spiritual about Philip Goff’s panpsychism, for example; as I argued above, it is merely an extension of materialism by including consciousness as an attribute of matter¹. On Descartes and his proposed proof of God, on the surface it appears to be purely logical, and I would agree with Murphy that it can therefore be judged purely on the quality of the argument. Whether or not it was influenced by a prior belief does not matter very much.
On the same theme, Murphy queries my use of the word ‘presume’ here: “Philosophers and others make such statements because they presume that materialism is true”. He asks: “Do you mean that materialists presume more than religious people, panpsychists, Cartesians, idealists, etc. presume? Do you mean that people accept materialism without thinking about it? Perhaps some people do. But are materialists any more likely to do this than I am, you are, etc?”
My general answer to his questions is yes. Some scientists and philosophers do accept materialism unquestioningly; Murphy has just written an article critical of the neurobiologist and professor of psychology Robert R. Provine, whose whole argument appears to be based upon an uncritical acceptance of the psychological Behaviourist school, therefore materialism. Another example would be the neuroscientist Erik Hoel, who thinks that he may have discovered the true purpose of dreams, even though he attempts this from an exclusively biological and evolutionary (therefore materialist) perspective, and therefore, in my opinion, has no idea what a dream actually is². (Longer critique to follow.)
Another obvious and better known example would be Daniel Dennett, who seems to take atheism, materialism, and Darwinism as self-evident truth. Obviously none of this can be said to be unconscious in his case. The important point is that his philosophy and therefore his whole life’s work is built upon these assumptions. He would presumably find it regrettable if his fundamental preconceptions were misguided. How much time does he spend examining them?
The problem is that such people mistakenly believe that ‘Enlightenment’ science has proved materialism to be true. I do indeed mean that materialists presume more than panpsychists, Cartesians, idealists, and some religious people, as I argued above.
I wrote that materialists believe “that the universe is nothing more than the interactions of particles obeying the laws of nature”. Murphy asks what “nothing more” means, stating that most materialists accept “complexity, higher-order phenomena, that certain domains can’t be well described or explained in terms of the ‘interactions of particles’ ”. Not being aware of any surveys of materialists on this point, I am willing to accept what he says. However, it is certainly true that some materialists deny the existence of higher-order phenomena, for example, Patricia and Paul Churchland, and Susan Blackmore, who go so far as to deny the existence of consciousness, calling it an illusion. That aside, to pursue Murphy’s point, we would obviously have to take a look at some examples of specific statements by specific philosophers to see what they mean. The key phrase is “can’t be well described or explained” (by the laws of physics). We would then have to examine how materialists do attempt to explain such complex, higher-order phenomena. I would say that they have a hard task, and their frequent ruse is to resort to evolutionary ‘just-so’ explanations.
Murphy objects that “for every person who ‘presumes’ that there is no God, there are 1000 who presume that there is a God. For every person who presumes that there are no ‘supernatural forces’, there are far more people who presume that there are”. He also says that he does not know how it is possible to demonstrate the truth of materialism because it is a metaphysical doctrine, and that my request for materialists to do so is inappropriate.
I have a minor quibble with his use of ‘metaphysical’, and would prefer ‘philosophical’, since materialism, almost by definition, is not a metaphysical viewpoint, since it believes that there is nothing beyond the material world, and the laws of ‘nature’. More importantly, the word ‘presume’ is interesting in this context. Does he mean that people who believe in supernatural forces do so on the basis of no evidence, that it is therefore a matter of faith? I believe in supernatural (i.e. non-materialist) forces, but on the basis of my own experiences, not because I have some unconscious motivation for doing so, and therefore merely ‘presume’ that they exist.
Murphy says that my statement that much modern philosophy is based upon the illusion of materialism, taken on its own, is a rhetorical statement. He says that he isn’t against rhetoric in principle, as long as it can be backed up with argument and data. He is unsure whether I have done so. There isn’t time to go into a lengthy debate here, but we only have to go back to the Hard Problem of consciousness. The ‘fact’ that it is insoluble has forced philosophers like Philip Goff and Thomas Nagel to adopt versions of panpsychism, and David Chalmers, who coined the term the ‘Hard Problem’, to adopt ‘naturalistic dualism’. I could also point out that consciousness has to exist before philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland, and psychologists like Susan Blackmore, can call it an illusion. It is their consciousness making that statement.
I would be interested to know what evidence, if any, Murphy thinks supports materialism.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. I am currently engaged in a debate on Medium on that point with Jack Preston King, who thinks I’ve got that wrong, but I am as yet unconvinced.
2. as described in a New Scientist article, magazine issue 3307, published November 7th 2020
