Abstract
Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical or mental properties, nor to the sum of such properties. I agree with this important principle and with the critique of the mereological fallacy which it underpins, but I have two objections to the authors’ view. Firstly, I think that the brain is not literally a part of the human being, as suggested. Secondly, Bennett and Hacker do not offer an account of body and mind which explains in a systematic way how the domain of phenomena which transcends the mental and the physical relates to the mental and the physical. I first argue that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides the kind of account we need. Then, drawing on Plessner, I present an alternative view of the mereological relationships between brain and human being. My criticism does not undercut Bennett and Hacker’s diagnosis of the mereological fallacy but rather gives it a more solid philosophical–anthropological foundation.
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Notes
This tradition runs from Émil Du Bois-Reymond’s (1872) Paper Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens (The Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature)—although there might be earlier examples—via Gestalt theorists like Wolfgang Köhler and phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to the contemporary critiques of reductionism such as Nagel (1974, 2012), Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), Dreyfus (1992), Moss (2004) and Krüger (2010), and many others.
Bennett and Hacker rightly make an exception for abnormal circumstances, e.g., in case of some forms of depression (PFN, 444, fn. 13).
Searle’s statement that the brain is not part of the body might seem in tension with his principle that “brains cause minds”, but it is not. The claim that brains cause minds does not imply that the brain is the mind.
This work, originally published in 1928, has not yet been translated into English; translations of passages from this work are my own.
This meaning of “philosophical anthropology” is more specific than the general sense of any philosophy that develops a fundamental conception of the human being. Cf. Fischer (2008), 9, 519–520, 595.
The difference between “human being” and “person” is addressed in the next section.
I am assuming continuity between Hacker and collaborative work by Bennett and Hacker.
Since “human being” and “person” have in fact the same extension (as there are, as far as we know, no other organisms than the human being which are persons), I will use these terms more or less as equivalents.
Below I support this claim by going into Plessner’s philosophy. But we can here also think of Husserl’s concept of Leib (Husserl 2012, § 28) or of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body (see footnotes 12, 18, and 25).
Consequently, Robinson (2004, 144) is mistaken when he suggests that Bennett and Hacker embrace a “discursive dualism” after the fashion of Descartes: “Bodies do not cogate, persons do… It is the person as res cogitans and not some extended property of that entity, such as its brain.”
The question of whether a fundamental theory of the human being is possible could also be addressed by discussing the nature of philosophy and its method. Whereas Bennett and Hacker start from Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy, Plessner combines phenomenology and hermeneutics. However, instead of making an argument on this meta-level, I will embrace the proverb “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”, and present the content of Plessner’s view as convincingly as I can.
Plessner’s view may remind some readers of aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy which, after all, also emphasizes the importance of the body in our being in the world. Although the comparison with Merleau-Ponty falls beyond the scope of this article, let me shortly sum up two main differences between Plessner and Merleau-Ponty: (a) Whereas Plessner consistently recognizes that our bodies are not only subjects, open to the world, but also objects, placed in that same world, Merleau-Ponty is less clear on this issue. In La structure du comportement (2008; SC) he suggests that the body proper is to us “an object among objects” (2008; SC, 128/118) and in Le visible et l’invisible (178/137) he distinguishes between “the order of the ‘object’” and “the order of the ‘subject’” (note the quotation marks around “subject” and “object”). However, in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; PP) he insists that only a part of the body proper can become objective to us, because the body is essentially a subject, which would exclude it being also an object (1945; PP, 107–108/105). (b) Because Merleau-Ponty wants to steer clear of intellectualism, he always emphasizes our engagement in the world (1945; PP, ix/xvi, 97/94, 253/254, 324/326–327, 358/361–362, 382/386). Contrary to Plessner, he is wary of affirming that a certain distance to our being in the world could also be constitutive of human existence. For this reason we do not find any concept similar to “eccentricity” in Merleau-Ponty.
We find variants of such a triadic structure, which goes beyond dualism, in more recent approaches to the mind–body problem within cognitive science, for instance in Hanna and Thompson (2003), and in enactive approaches such as Thompson (2007), Desmidt et al. (2014), and Colombetti (2014). The enactive approach differs from earlier approaches in cognitive science in that it focuses more on forms of higher-order cognition, such as the metaphorical use of language, which presuppose a strong disengagement from the world of sense-perception (cf. Froese 2012). It explores how human behavior is structured by a distance from the world which is alien to (other) animals. It should be noted that all these views overlook Plessner’s early and fruitful approach to the mind–body problem and his concept of eccentricity.
I do not have the space here to illustrate this point extensively, but according to Plessner the human being always lives within the tension between his nature, which expresses itself in needs, disease, subconscious desires, mortality, on the one hand, and his freedom as a spiritual, personal being on the other hand.
Plessner indeed argues that animal communities are not as deeply social as human communities. The debate about the difference between human beings and animals has to remain somewhat in the background here. However, I do want to refer to Tomasello (2014) who argues that, unlike animals, human beings “see” themselves from the perspective of conspecifics and that this fundamentally determines their behavior. This claim, which Tomasello bases on a great amount of recent empirical research, is fully in agreement with Plessner’s view.
This sensing of the tacit presence of others, which Plessner regards as the basis of shame and morality, illustrates that eccentricity is not limited to acts of self-reflection. It is a more basic structure, which makes self-reflection possible but also many phenomena which are not explicitly reflective. As I will explain below, laughing, although a visceral and immediate response to a situation, is also an expression of eccentricity.
So, in Plessner’s view, the objective body has two aspects. The physical aspect includes all properties which my body shares with non-living things, i.e., properties like mass, volume, resistance, electric charge (on a microscale, in the brain), and so forth. The organic aspect includes all properties which make my body a living body: the fact that it is born, grows, grows old, dies, etc. The organic properties refer to a subject who lives the body “from within”. At this point, again, the comparison with Merleau-Ponty is interesting. When Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the body proper is to us not only a subject but also an object (see footnote 12), he restricts himself to the body as an organic object, and emphasizes that the body is by no means part of the physical world: “for us consciousness experiences its inherence in an organism at each moment; for it is not a question of an inherence in material apparatuses… but of a presence to consciousness of its proper history and of the dialectical stages which it has traversed” (SC, 224–225/208).
Due to the dialectical structure of Plessner’s thinking, “being the body” and “having the body” can be interpreted in different ways. For one alternative interpretation, cf. Shusterman (2010).
Plessner’s “interlacing” (Verschränkung; Plessner 1982b, 240/36) of the subjective and the objective body is remindful of Merleau-Ponty’s “intertwining” (entrelacs; 1964, 180/138) of the seeing body and the body seen. There is indeed great similarity between these two notions: both describe the ambiguous relationship between the subjective and the objective body. Although Plessner, together with Buytendijk, introduced his notion of the interlacing of subject and object in their Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks, originally published in 1925, neither Merleau-Ponty nor his interpreters refer to Plessner.
This ontic or factual reduction is of course not the same as philosophical reductionism. Ontic reduction occurs when physical or organic influences diminish my vitality, my subjectivity, and/or my personhood. When I die, this ontic reduction becomes definite. Cf. Merleau-Ponty 163, 218–219/150, 202–203.
In the example, the “mental” refers to the mind as a subjective relationship to the external world, viz. Treadway attempting to row his boat. Below I present an example in which “mind” refers to the person’s inner world.
I am not assuming that Searle would agree with this solution. A comparison between Searle and Plessner falls beyond the scope of this article. Rom Harré also argues that the brain is not part of the person but, in my view, he mistakenly concludes from this that we are not dealing with a mereological problem at all. The real mistake would be the violation of “the radical disjunction of moral and factual judgments” (Harré 2012, 339). I think Harré overlooks the possibility of a different interpretation of the mereological relationship between brain and person, namely the interpretation presented here. In my view, the mereological fallacy goes together with the reduction, addressed by Harré, of the moral domain to mere facts. I do not understand why Harré assumes that these two kinds of fallacy exclude one another.
“Lifeworld” is a concept Plessner adopted from Husserl.
Again the comparison with Merleau-Ponty is interesting. Merleau-Ponty agrees with Plessner that I do not perceive my own body in the same way that I perceive an external object (pp 106/103–104). According to Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception, this is so because the body is not an object but rather a subject (see footnote 12). In Plessner’s view, however, the reason that I cannot explore my body in the way that I explore an external object is that my body is both a subject and an object: I cannot, as a subject, detach myself from this thing that is my body.
I say “under normal circumstances” because there are exceptions to this rule: if I have a brain concussion and science informs me about my condition, I will relate my headaches to the state of my brain, which thereby, albeit in a limited way, “enters” my phenomenal world.
By speaking of a first- and third-person perspective I am following today’s usage in phenomenology. Plessner instead speaks of a turn from our “immediate or mediate understanding” to the “causal explanation” of life (1982a, 78), or from the “original living context” to the “isolating techniques” of science (1982b, 216/1970, 16).
The meanings and values from the lifeworld will play a role in communication, ethical decisions, and in motivating the scientist to do her work, but when she concentrates on her subject-matter, the scientist aspires to understanding the phenomena in a purely descriptive manner. For example, someone who does cancer research will do so because she wants to eradicate this disease and help to cure as many patients as possible, because the patients and the researcher agree that cancer is “a very bad thing” (to put it mildly). However, my point is that this value-judgment does not play a direct role in the researcher’s description of the causal mechanisms underlying the spread of cancer or its cure.
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van Buuren, J. The philosophical–anthropological foundations of Bennett and Hacker’s critique of neuroscience. Cont Philos Rev 49, 223–241 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9318-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9318-4