Why Things Matter

The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion

David M. Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780415493703
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136670664
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

In this book, David M. Black asks questions such as 'why do we care?' and 'what gives our values power?' using ideas from psychoanalysis and its adjacent sciences such as neuroscience and evolutionary biology in order to do so.

Why Things Matter explores how the comparatively new scientific discipline of consciousness studies requires us to recognize that subjectivity is as irreducible a feature of the world as matter and energy. Necessarily inter-disciplinary, this book draws on science, philosophy and the history of religion to argue that there can be influential values which are not based exclusively on biological need or capricious life-style choices. It suggests that many recent scientific critics of religion, including Freud, have failed to see clearly the issues at stake.

This book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as counsellors with an interest in the basis of religious feeling and in moral and aesthetic values. The book will also be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Science and Values

Intellectual productions, however lofty their pretensions, ultimately stem from rather simple motives. That is certainly the case with the present book. One root from which it springs is the shock I remember feeling, as a young man at the time of the Vietnam War, hearing of a research chemist in California who was working to improve the adhesion of napalm to human flesh. We were daily seeing news from the war, including pictures of people on fire with the inextinguishable flames of napalm – how did this man feel, I wondered, about the work he was doing? What was in his mind when he went home in the evening and embraced the (presumably) undamaged bodies of his wife and children?

The philosopher Michael Polanyi, a background influence in much of my thinking, abandoned his first career as a biochemist when he watched his colleagues in 1933 Berlin transfer their expertise to the service of the new Nazi authorities, seemingly without self-questioning or qualms of conscience. How was it possible, he asked himself, that people who were professionally dedicated to an ideal, to the pursuit of scientific truth, could be so indifferent to considerations of morality? The question led Polanyi into his profound study (Polanyi 1958) of the personal implications of a commitment to scientific research. In order to study it, he enlarged his thinking to include psychology and philosophy, and he came to comment acutely on the arts, on the psychology of creativity and on religion. I can make no claim to Polanyi’s breadth or profundity, but I have also found it necessary, attempting to address these questions of science and its relation to values, to broaden out from my home discipline (psychoanalysis in my case) to look at adjacent disciplines such as neuroscience and evolutionary theory, and also at philosophy. In fact, for me personally, the fifteen years or so over which these chapters have been meditated has been a time in which my great admiration for science has gradually moderated to make room for a recognition that science, at least as we have known it since the time of Galileo, and more especially since the time of Charles Darwin and Hermann Helmholtz, has become dangerously unbalanced. It stands in need of rebalancing, especially by philosophers who understand, better than scientists as a rule, the nature of the traps into which our use of specialised languages perpetually lures us. This need is seen most acutely in relation to values. How can values have force for us if they fail to show up in the landscape of ‘fact’? – and yet, at any rate on a naive reading of science, ‘value-free’ scientific materialism appears to have cornered the market in declaring what is to be considered factual.

The requirement for breadth of understanding is bound to be a problem for anyone wishing to think or write about science and values. The issues exist in a space among or between many recognised disciplines, each of which calls for specialist knowledge – developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, cognitive science and neuroscience, evolutionary biology and the relatively new discipline of consciousness studies; all these need to be put in relation to the philosophy of values, of selves, and of ‘reality’ (that so familiar and deceitful word); they need to be examined too in relation to the history of our metaphors and to the ongoing dialogue between religion, ‘atheism’ (which I think of as a form of religion) and secularism. It would be helpful too to know some physics. Nobody is going to meet these requirements in full, and in a sense it becomes more difficult to do so, as time goes on, because the knowledge within each specialism grows vaster and the time required to keep up with it becomes greater. Those who are most expert in any one discipline are often the least flexible when thinking more generally. Even within my own field, which by comparison with psychology for example is quite small, no one can keep abreast of all that is published, year after year, in the (serious, peer-reviewed) psychoanalytic journals. And if you read the journals, you do not read the books, in which much of the more developed arguments are made. The same is true in all the fields I have mentioned.

Nevertheless, the issue of science and its relation to values is not going to disappear. Perhaps until the nineteenth century it seemed to most thinkers as if it could be dealt with by keeping the two topics separate: science could deal with the natural world, religion with values and ‘spiritual’ matters. The disengaged ‘I’ of Descartes, able to exist as nothing but the subject of the verb to think, was defined not by coincidence in the seventeenth century just as Galileo and Francis Bacon were launching what would become the Scientific Revolution; it occupied a virtual space altogether separate from the entirely mechanical universe it looked out on. A hundred years later, the pure rational subject of Kantian moral action was still different in kind from the world of phenomena in which it operated, the world constrained by time and space that science was now beginning to grasp with ever-increasing effectiveness. But such separations became harder and harder to hold on to, and the mid-nineteenth century put a lasting end to them. With Helmholtz’s conservation of energy, and Darwin’s evolution of all species including humankind, it became necessary to imagine a new, unified universe, in which everything to do with life, including our own mental experience and our highest values, had all emerged within the history of the solar system and from the stuff of our unique, extraordinary planet. There was no longer any point of entry for anything ‘supernatural’ or spiritual to act effectively in the world. If one wants to speak of the ‘triumphs’ of scientific thinking, that moment marks its supreme achievement. It eliminated, perhaps for ever, the idea that had haunted philosophers certainly since the time of Plato, that there could a dualism, an efficacious realm of ‘spirit’ alongside or superior to the ordinary visible realm of ‘matter’. Since the mid-nineteenth century, science, and the thought of educated people more generally, has increasingly come to accept that ‘there’s just one thing here’ – monism, not dualism.

Many scientists still speak of this picture as ‘materialism’, and I shall do so myself from time to time. But of course the word materialism is itself a hangover from the time of dualism, when ‘matter’ – inert, mechanical, ‘base’ – was contrasted with vital and creative ‘spirit’. If dualism disappears, so too, necessarily, do the twin terms that compose it. The stuff of the new monism is no more ‘matter’ than it is ‘spirit’: in fact we still have no proper word for it, although physics, at the start of the twentieth century, would also radically reconceive the nature of its subject-matter and show that what had been thought to be inert and mechanical – the old-fashioned indivisible, bullet-like ‘atoms’ – was in reality a construction of energies, mostly empty space, impossible to pin down, and eluding all definitions. Speaking in 1927, the astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington summarised the new quantum mechanics: ‘Something unknown is doing we don’t know what’ (Eddington 1929: 291). (He added that nevertheless we can know a great deal about this obscure realm, because we can introduce numbers into it.) As physicists described the quantum, physiologists also increasingly discovered the astounding energy of ‘life’ that caused cells and minute organisms to propagate themselves at astonishing speed and in thousands of millions. Psychologists and neuroscientists, concerned with larger, multi-cellular organisms, tried for a time not to notice that, with increased complexity, these organisms also possessed or acquired another puzzling characteristic, namely, ‘consciousness’. This characteristic was so puzzling and so scandalous that behaviourist psychologists like J.B. Watson tried initially to define it out of existence, or declared it a mere ‘epiphenomenon’, a sort of meaningless excrescence that played no causal role in the universe. Even now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, there are many philosophers and neuroscientists who claim that consciousness is entirely inefficacious: the world, they believe, would be exactly as it is even if there were no consciousness. (I shall look at some of these current theories of consciousness in Chapter 2.)

One of the difficult problems in an interdisciplinary field is to keep track of the different meanings that the same small repertory of words has for thinkers with different backgrounds. If we describe the new philosophical view as ‘materialism’, we will quickly be misled by our language into speaking of the world as made of ‘matter’, with the old implication of lifeless and inert; in this view, life and consciousness become problems demanding reductive explanation. I shall try instead, as a rule, to use the word monism, often qualifying it, in an attempt to get at the richness of the new conception, by speaking of ‘multi-level monism’. But monism is also not a very satisfactory word, and neither is ‘level’. The one is too abstract, the other a metaphor with too many implications. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, trying to get behind another dualism our language imposes on us, the division of a person into a mind and a body, used to speak of ‘the psychosomatic unit’. One of the challenges we are up against, at the present stage of our thinking, is how to overcome these suggestive and simplistic dichotomies that are built so deeply into ordinary language. However much we try to be alert, our ordinary language exerts a constant strain on our thinking, tugging it back towards traditional conceptions even while we claim to be stepping beyond them.

As consciousness appears to have emerged in more than one evolutionary line, I shall assume that it does play an efficacious role (how otherwise would it have been selected?) and therefore shall assume that the question that should most concern us is not whether it has a role but what that role is. (I shall discuss this question in particular in Chapter 6.) Looking from this perspective, among the many issues that arise is the issue of values. Values (I shall argue) come into existence with the emergence of life, and the underlying question throughout this book (I think of my scientist ‘improving’ the adhesion of napalm) is: what gives values power in our lives? At the most primitive levels of life, what has value is very simply what enables survival and continuation of the species; there are many questions one might ask, but the function of those early values is probably not mysterious. By the time we get to human beings, however, values have become enormously complicated. We are bound to assume that our values are the heir to the sort of values that influenced the earliest life-forms, but the attempt to derive the values of civilised human beings from the imperatives of evolution is still very speculative and uncertain. It falls foul of the fact that human beings in different societies, despite having much the same DNA, have extremely different values; and even the same human being, at different moments in his or her life, is governed by very different values.

In this book, I keep returning to one of the great historical moments of change in human values, the one that started in the seventeenth century and is generally described as the Enlightenment or the birth of the Scientific Revolution. Previously, in religious Europe, approved values could be given a very secure base: they represented God’s will. It was God’s will that you obeyed your feudal lord, that you were faithful to your spouse, that you did not practise witchcraft or murder the neighbour you happened to dislike or envy. And because God was the object of strong emotions of love, fear, worship and so on, God’s will was important to you – you wanted to please him, or you feared displeasing him. But now, as rationality gradually displaced religious teaching as the central source of authority, the question of what attached you to your values became increasingly urgent. What constrained you? Did anything constrain you? A couple of decades after Darwin published The Origin of Species, Nietzsche put the issue into words with classic simplicity: ‘God is dead,’ he said, ‘all is permitted’. It is hard not to think that the scale of violence in the twentieth century, incomparably greater than that of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, bears some relation to the moral shift that Nietzsche so promptly intuited.

On a less theoretical plane, this violence was also the product of the continuing advance of science. Kant in the eighteenth century had already foreseen that humankind’s weapons might in the future become so terrifying that only the threat of total mutual destruction would prevent their use; the Cold War in the second half of the twentieth century proved his prescience. Those who want to speak of the triumphs of science should remember that those triumphs have come at a terrible cost, and it would be (to put it mildly) optimistic to imagine that all the bills have yet been paid. My Californian chemist, improving the adhesion of napalm, was a mere foot-soldier in the great army of scientists, working in academic or industrial settings, who appear to believe that they live professionally in a value-free world – an attitude they no doubt justify to themselves by believing that it too is ‘scientific’. Many scientists, including some of the most distinguished such as Einstein and Heisenberg, have as they got older addressed this issue with increasing urgency, but these discussions remain curiously outside the scientific mainstream; they retain a certain air of eccentricity, and they seem, at any rate so far, to provide no generally recognised reference points.

The reason is, I think, that the radical ontological implications of the mid-nineteenth century development (that associated with Helmholtz and Darwin) – another historical landmark to which I shall repeatedly refer – have not been easy for those concerned about values to fully understand and digest. It has often seemed safest, for those who wanted to conserve values, to return to religious stances that were no longer compatible with the new scientific picture. I have no intention, in saying this, of sounding patronising. There is a very genuine difficulty here, and the hasty pursuit of intellectual consistency is not the highest value. It is often more honest to hold on to apparently incompatible insights, with all the accompanying discomfort, in the hope that some deeper resolution may be achieved in the future. Much of my own writing takes place in that kind of uncomfortable position.

In this context, psychoanalysis has played an interesting part. When Freud started his career as a laboratory scientist, he worked as a neuroanatomist under the physiologist Martin Brücke; Brücke in turn was one of Hermann Helmholz’s circle, dedicated to a strict philosophical materialism. (The word, dedicated, is no exaggeration: Brücke as a young man had ‘sworn a solemn oath’, though to what divinity is not recorded, to accept no explanations that were not reducible to the basic terms of physics and chemistry (Sulloway 1979: 14).) Freud probably never explicitly repudiated this philosophical stance. However, when he left neuroanatomical research in the early 1890s, and started to develop psychoanalysis, the neurological knowledge of his time was too rudimentary and inflexible to support him. (I shall examine this transition in more detail in Chapter 7, when I look at what led him to his theory of a death drive.) In Freud’s famous change of mind in 1897, when he realised that the stories of parental sexual abuse that he was hearing from his patients could not in all cases be true, and suspected therefore that what he was being told was ‘phantasy’ rather than reality, he allowed himself to make a crucial move. He allowed himself to think that ‘phantasy’, like ‘reality’, could have effects in the real world. From this move has flowed most of the broad stream of psychoanalytic conceptions: transference, splitting of the mind, many sorts of defence mechanism, psychic retreats, the importance of maternal reverie and emotional containment. It is common in psychoanalytic circles to hear reference to ‘psychic reality’, a strong term intended to convey that the effects of phantasy are not always slight and easily set aside as the ordinary-language term, ‘fantasy’, might suggest. (British analysts from the 1930s onward increasingly adopted Melanie Klein’s Germanic spelling of the word phantasy, to indicate that they were speaking, not of something trivial, but of something that might be deeply unconscious and deeply influential, as the baby’s phantasies about the mother’s breast and body were held to be.) ‘Deep unconscious phantasy’ was held to structure the mind, and to influence the way the world was affectively perceived, even by the most realistic of adults.

Freud never quite gave up his hope that a developed neuroscience would eventually give concrete support for all these ideas, and as I shall suggest in later chapters, the ideas of Gerald Edelman (1992), and other more recent neuroscientists, have to a significant extent begun now to fulfil some of that hope. The degree to which the brain develops its detailed structure in response to early emotional experience, now a commonplace, makes a striking parallel to the psychoanalytic account of the early development of the ‘mind’ in response to the baby’s relationship experience, and it has strongly confirmed the psychoanalytic belief in the importance of early relationships with care-givers. The psychoanalyst Mark Solms and others have begun to develop a neuropsychoanalysis in which the structure of dreaming, for example, seems to confirm many elements in Freud’s account (Solms and Turnbull 2002). In that sense, one could say that Freud’s psychoanalysis has served, to use one of his own favourite words, as a ‘detour’ that may eventually bring us back onto the better signposted path of neurology. However, in the process, psychoanalysis has also introduced a very different conception: it now seems that, just as the phenomena of consciousness can be influenced by physical events – very obviously in the case of such events as strokes and physical brain-damage – and new consciousnesses come into being as a result of a physical act, namely sexual intercourse, so too physical things, such as brains, can be influenced by mental events such as phantasies and transference-based construals of reality. It seems that the flows of causation can travel in both directions.

You will notice that I am already offending against my principles, and when I say ‘travel in both directions’ I am using a dualistic picture of the person. I am afraid that will often be unavoidable. But it also follows from the development of psychoanalysis, and the more recent discoveries in neuroscience, that the adoption of monistic ‘materialism’ does not have to conflict with a recognition of the extreme sensitivity and subtlety of our mental life. Perhaps much of the prejudice that people have felt against materialism springs from this cause: ‘materialism’ (in the philosophical sense) has seemed a diminishing thing, and has got mixed up too with ‘materialism’ in the consumer-society sense, a greedy and simplistic preoccupation with things and other people as objects of consumption and use, including sexual use. The history of the Communist regimes of the twentieth century, self-described as followers of Marxist philosophical ‘materialism’, has also contributed to a sort of reflex dislike and fear of the implications of materialism. But as already said, ‘materialism’ is no longer properly the correct word for the modern scientific understanding, and whether these fears are well or ill founded will largely depend on what place in a ‘monistic’ picture can still be found for values. For the purposes of this book, I shall adopt as best I can, despite the slipperiness of language, the perspective of ‘multi-level monism’. That is, I think, the philosophical stance most compatible with the position of the modern sciences (including psychoanalysis). This stance seems to me unmistakably preferable to the more reductive monisms (such as behaviourist psychology or ‘physicalism’ in consciousness studies), which are one set of alternatives to it. Whether the other traditional alternatives of dualism or pluralism can still be supported I shall not consider here; scientific language is not, I think, capable of giving such theories a fair hearing: they necessarily depend on faith.

That then in extremely broad terms is the historical and conceptual framework in which I shall try to think about values in the present book. When I started writing on these themes, in the mid-1990s, I felt as though I was rather on my own with them; since then, many more people have written about them, and I have also discovered intelligent thinkers who have addressed similar problems, and arrived at recognisably similar solutions, right back to the time of Darwin. What I shall be saying was anticipated by William James in the 1890s, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: science and values
• 2. Consciousness: ‘a fact without parallel’
• 3. Value-free science? Galileo and Darwin
• 4. Sympathy is different from empathy
• 5. How religions work: a comparison with psychoanalysis
• 6. The ownership of consciousness and the uniqueness of subjects
• 7. Mapping a detour: why did Freud speak of a death drive?
• 8. An outline of a ‘contemplative position’
• 9. Selves and no-selves
• 10. The basis of responsible commitment
• References
• Index