Original Minds

Eleanor Wachtel

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780006394198
• eBook ISBN: 9781443402439
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Eleanor Wachtel's award-winning CBC Radio programme Writers & Company has set the gold standard for intelligent, insightful, riveting interviews. To mark the dawn of the new millennium, Wachtel talked to some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers of our time -- people who have forever changed their area of specialty and influenced the world around them. As she writes in her introduction, "I wanted to interview people who had shaped the last century and whose influence would continue into the next…I hoped to have wide-ranging conversations with some of the most inspiring men and women of our time, people who've made a difference."

And what an outstanding list of people she met:

• Jonathan Miller — internationally acclaimed theatre and opera director, writer, member of Beyond the Fringe comedy troupe
• Jane Goodall — primatologist and scientist best known for her work with chimpanzees
• Bernardo Bertolucci — director whose films including the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor and Last Tango in Paris
• George Steiner — teacher, literary critic and theorist
• Desmond Tutu — former Archbishop of South Africa and co-chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Susan Sontag — writer of novels, essays, works of non-fiction, and plays. In America won the National Book Award in 2000.
• Amartya Sen — Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1998)
• Gloria Steinem — feminist and activist, author whose 1983 collection of essays is titled Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
• Jared Diamond — teacher, Pulitzer Prize winner for Guns, Germs and Steel
• Oliver Sacks — neurologist, best known for his books Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
• Jane Jacobs — internationally respected commentator on city design and planning
• Umberto Eco — "the Pavarotti of Semiotics" and writer of the international bestseller The Name of the Rose
• Mary Douglas — anthropologist, author of the classic Purity and Danger (1966)
• Noam Chomsky — world-famous linguist and dissident intellectual
• Arthur C. Clarke — writer, best known for his science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Harold Bloom — "one of the world's most influential critic-scholar-theorists" according to The New York Times

Each interview enlightens not only the subject's master area but how we see the world and our role in it. Not content to sit back on their intellectual laurels, Wachtel's subjects seem driven to influence their world and encourage us to do likewise. As Jane Goodall says, "The nicest thing I'm told after lectures is that I make people realize that their lives have more value. And thousands of children from all over the world have said, 'You taught me that because you did it, I can do it too.' That's amazing. That makes it all—all this effort—really worthwhile."

A book for Eleanor Wachtel's many devotees and for anyone who has a curiosity about the fascinating intersection of people and ideas, Original Minds is a captivating read.

JONATHAN MILLER

I decided to begin with Jonathan Miller because he embraces so many subjects with fervent wit, curiosity and a capacious intelligence. His enthusiasms are so diverse that many people think there are two Jonathan Millers—or even three. My first exposure to him was through the antic comedy of Beyond the Fringe, a satirical revue that goes back to 1960 at the Edinburgh Festival, and went on to be a hit in London and New York. There were Beyond the Fringe recordings, and I can still remember many of those sketches.

Jonathan Miller was already a medical doctor when he became a performer, but that didn’t really surface publicly until his thirteen-part television series on the history of medicine, The Body in Question, which also became a book (1978). It took a while for me to realize this was the same Jonathan Miller who’d performed with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in Beyond the Fringe.

The third Jonathan Miller is the international director of theatre and opera, from the BBC Shakespeare series of the 1980s and working for London’s National Theatre and the Old Vic, to directing more than fifty opera productions in London, New York, Paris, Florence, Berlin and Zurich. Along the way, he wrote a book about theatre called The Afterlife of Plays (1992) and edited books about Freud, Don Giovanni, and humour.

Miller is famous for his innovative stage productions, often drawing on paintings or photographs for inspiration. When I went to see him, he was directing Rossini’s Ermione for the Santa Fe Opera. The story takes place just after the Trojan War, but Miller decided to set it in nineteenth-century America, in the aftermath of the Civil War, creating a charcoal-toned set designed to look like a period daguerreotype. “It’s another long fratricidal war,” he explained to me. “And it gets rid of those damn Greek tunics.”

In the last few years, Jonathan Miller has produced two books of visual art—one, On Reflection (1998), is based on a show about perception that he curated for the National Gallery in London. The other is a selection of his own colour photographs and notebook entries, going back thirty years, a striking book called Nowhere in Particular (1999).

While he was in Santa Fe, between rehearsals of Ermione, he had found a welder and was working on a sculpture, using rusty bits of odds and ends, a rather large and attractive construction. Of course, Miller’s father was a philosopher who became interested in anthropology, who studied medicine and became a psychiatrist interested in criminology, who also painted and sculpted in his spare time.

Jonathan Miller is still something of a physical comic, with an expressive, mobile face. His conversation ranges from anthropology and art to neuroscience, psychology and theatre, but he doesn’t hesitate to reproduce his imitations of clucking hens or a railway train, sketches that saved him from being bullied at school when he was eight years old. As we headed for one of the rehearsal rooms of the Santa Fe Opera, he mooched a cigarette from a cast member. “It’s OK,” he said, “I’m a doctor.”

WACHTEL You’ve said that even as a child you were interested in the functioning of the brain. Do you know where such an unusual preoccupation for a child came from? What sparked it?

MILLER I don’t really know where original curiosities arise. I can remember the first moment—at least my father tells me it was the first moment—when I seemed to show some interest in it. I suppose I must have been about six or seven, perhaps younger. He was opening his copy of Gray’s Anatomy and came to the section where there were coloured illustrations of the brain. I asked him where the mind was, and I think he was stopped short in his tracks that someone should actually see that there might be a difference between “brain” and “mind,” albeit with a connection. I don’t think I showed any particular interest in it after that, but I think that from the outset of studying biology I was interested in what it was that made creatures behave and why it was that they didn’t behave like rocks and puddles, why they seemed to have minds of their own, why they went in the opposite direction to the direction in which stones rolled on slopes. This seemed to me to be a rather puzzling and interesting thing, particularly when it was executed by something as small as an ant, which didn’t seem to have much room for the sort of apparatus necessary to enable it or provoke it to go uphill, against gravity. From then on, I began to show an interest in these things.

WACHTEL Do you have any idea why you knew that the mind and the brain were connected?

MILLER I’m not really certain that I did know they were connected. Why I should, at the age of six, have said, “Where is the mind?” when shown a cross-section of the brain, remains a mystery to me. But I seemed to have had some sort of intimation that there was something about the head that seemed to be responsible for what I called the mind. I suppose a lot of people feel that the mind is in the head for the simple reason that the most important sense organ, the eyes, which deliver most of the content of consciousness—in other words, the visual world—are in the head, and I felt therefore that I saw the world from my head. Now, whether I really understood at that time that I saw the world with my head because of something in addition to the eyes is quite doubtful. I don’t think I really understood that the eyes were really not much more than a portal through which things gained access to the inside of the head and that the inside of the head was what executed the extraordinarily complicated business of enabling me to see trees rather than just moving greenness.

WACHTEL You once described the first time you went to the cinema, when you were about seven years old, and saw The Reluctant Dragon. Even there it wasn’t just the plot or the drama that you responded to; there was another dimension that you seemed to be aware of.

MILLER I was aware of the fact that I saw pictures that moved on a screen and that when I turned my head there was this fluttering, fluted beam made visible by the smoke—smoking was allowed in the cinema in those days—that seemed to issue from the chamber where the projector was. I saw then that there was a relationship between what could be seen and some source of visual information that was carried by this fluttering beam because I couldn’t see a picture until the beam was intercepted by a screen. This seemed to me, at that time, to be a model of what perception was like, that perhaps the eye was like a projector and there was some sort of neurological equivalent of a beam which projected it to a screen in the head. I didn’t realize at that time that such a model would have set up an infinite regress. If there was a screen inside my head, what was there looking at the screen? One had to set up the idea that there was another projector and another screen, and therefore an infinite regress of spectators. This, of course, is what one philosopher has described as the Cartesian theatre, the idea that there is a phantom spectator seated in a viewing room. It can’t work like that, of course, for lots of reasons. I suppose as I became more and more acquainted with the brain, I realized that it is not something that accommodates a spectator, wherein that individual sits and looks at something projected, but that something about the brain, by virtue of its organization, gives rise to a subjective experience on the part of the owner of the brain.

I think now that there is perhaps an impenetrable mystery about why it is that something material and physical, the brain, can give rise to a subjective sensation, what the philosophers call qualia, or raw feelings. You can design a machine that behaves as if it distinguishes between red and green. With instructions, it can be trained to pick up red blocks and distinguish them from green blocks. But it’s very unlikely that machines have a feeling of what it’s like to see a red block. The mystery is how brains can give rise to something that is quite clearly not an observable phenomenon, the consciousness of redness. I think this will probably remain forever a mystery, although there are what we call radical eliminativists, who would like to take out of the system anything that might be non-material. I’m not saying that there is anything nonmaterial which enables one to have pain, consciousness of redness and anger. I’m absolutely committed to a fundamentally materialist view of the brain. I don’t think there’s anything other than brain, that something else sneaks in. I don’t think there’s a cat flap in the back of the brain into which the spirit somehow gains access because, once again, that returns you to the Cartesian theatre. I’m a materialist, anyway—I’m what one of my friends, Colin McGinn, who’s a philosopher at Rutgers, calls an agnostic materialist. I’m an absolutely dyed-in-the-wool materialist about brains and consciousness, but I think it may well be that we’ll never find out how it is that brains can give rise to feelings of redness on the part of their owner.

WACHTEL I want to talk more about consciousness in a few minutes, but, as a kid, you had what I would think of as pretty precocious kinds of perceptions, and yet you’ve described yourself as not clever as a schoolboy. You say that “It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I actually discovered I had a thoughtful mind.” How did you make that discovery?

MILLER I was pretty wretched as a child. I knew I wasn’t good at formal lessons. I couldn’t do math or straightforward grammar or anything that would make me pass as a student. I was restless as a child, for the simple reason that my family travelled a great deal during the war, from one post to another, following my father, who was a military psychiatrist. So I never settled down, and I felt ill at ease at school, frightened and inadequate. And then, when I was ten or eleven, my father gave me an old brass microscope, and I began looking at what we call infusions, like hay being stewed up in water, and saw for the first time animalcules, infusoria. I was intrigued, once again, as I suppose I must have been when I was a very small child, by the idea of the spontaneity and mobility of these unpromising, small things that I could see down this brass tube. I became committed to the idea of zoology, so I gave up classics and switched to the science side of school. This was much against the will and wishes of my headmaster, who said, “I know you would like to be a doctor.” At that time I didn’t particularly want to be a doctor, but he said, “If you give up classics, what do you think will happen when you discover a new disease and can’t name it because you don’t know any Latin?” That seemed to me an implausible objection. So I made the jump into the biology side, as we called it at school, and became an enthusiastic Darwinian biologist. I was exposed to Darwinian ideas by my teacher, who was very inspired and rather charismatic. With a number of friends, including Oliver Sacks and others, we became students of zoology and botany and living forms because of our great interest. I discovered that I was good at dissecting and that I was good at thinking about how these things worked. I became fascinated by animal physiology and also by the classification of animals, why it was that they were so different from one another, why they became more and more complicated as they seemed to ascend the evolutionary scale. And then I discovered that curiosity was what I had, and that my curiosity made me smart.

WACHTEL You grew up in an intellectual, cultured family. Your father, as well as being one of the inaugurators of forensic psychiatry, child guidance and child psychiatry, was also qualified in neurology and the law. He was twenty years older than your mother, who was a novelist and literary biographer. What was the atmosphere like in your home?

MILLER Well, it wasn’t conspicuously or even noticeably intellectual or literary when I was a child. My father was away a lot of the time because he was moving around the country—and even though we followed him, he was very busy. My mother was a rather hermetic and withdrawn writer. She would go to her study and type and write, and I don’t think she ever talked very much about the act of writing or, indeed, encouraged me to be a reader. I was a reader. I read Mowgli [a character in Kipling’s The Jungle Book]—that sort of thing—when I was a small boy. But I wasn’t aware of there being intellectual discourse in the house until I was fourteen or fifteen and began talking to my father about his study of zoology and philosophy. He’d been a student of people like Bertrand Russell and John McTaggart, who was an English philosophical idealist. But, nevertheless, the bookshelves were lined with these volumes and I gradually began to dip into them. I remember at the age of fifteen reading Russell’s Analysis of Mind and, once again, the notion of mentality began to interest me. There are all sorts of things that Russell invoked which I now don’t believe in—sense data, for example. Sense data sounds as if there are things given to a mind to look at, and I don’t think it works like that. But nevertheless, I was introduced to the notion that there was a problem about mentality and consciousness and perception and so forth, and also about action and what we mean by action, how we distinguish actions from mere events. And so by ±e time I was sixteen or seventeen, a philosophical mode of thought had begun to infiltrate my purely zoological interests and I began to think philosophically about what it was to be an organism and how organisms differed from things like stones and puddles.

WACHTEL You were also sent to psychiatrists as a child. Was that interesting or invasive?

MILLER I don’t think it was invasive. It was boring, because it got in the way of playing cricket. I never quite understood why I was going to them. I was a rather miserable child, and I used to wet myself a lot when I was younger. I think that was simply the anxiety of travelling a great deal and the insecurities and darkness of the surrounding war. All those things made life uneasy for me. I probably had difficulties and tantrums, which I can’t remember, that led to my being sent, one after another, to people like Susan Isaacs and even to D. W. Winnicott. So I was analyzed and brought up in the purple of British analysis, but I don’t think it made any difference to my life at all. Not that I can remember.

WACHTEL You talked once about how you thought your parents may have found it harder to deal with their own family than with strangers. Do you know why that was?

MILLER I don’t know. I think that my father was a characteristically Victorian figure, rather detached from his children, as many Victorian parents were. My mother was largely preoccupied with her work. She wasn’t really interested in domesticity. She felt as a dutiful wife that she was required to do things like cooking, but that, for her, consisted of from time to time tipping the carcass of a chicken into some boiling water and coming back half an hour later in the hope that one could eat what had resulted. She wasn’t physically affectionate and neither was my father, but I don’t think it was a defect of theirs. My father was born, after all, in 1893 and my mother was born in 1910, and overt affection and the sort of sloppy, dishevelled comforts of modern families never occurred to them.

WACHTEL How do you think they influenced you? Or inspired you?

MILLER By the time I was sixteen or seventeen and could talk to both of them, I began to pride myself on accurate physical descriptions of what was to be seen, making discriminating judgements about how things looked and what they looked like. The use of metaphor, for example. I remember, when I was quite young actually, pleasing and startling my mother after I’d walked across a lawn where the grass was heavily covered with hoarfrost and saying to her that it looked like lavender because of that white hair of hoarfrost. She stopped dead in her tracks, pleased that I had somehow drawn a comparison. She encouraged me by her appreciation of accurate metaphors and characterizations.

My father introduced me to ideas that were later very important to me. When I was a medical student, he talked a lot about a particular teacher who had had a great influence on him, the anthropologist and physiologist W. H. Rivers, who started life as a doctor and who’d written a great long chapter in Schaeffer’s Textbook of Physiology. Rivers was also one of the founding fathers of British anthropology and was interested in the significance of symbolic thought in social structures, as well as in physiology. I would have conversations with my father about the structure of the mind as the brain imposed structure upon it, and then he would invoke John Hughlings Jackson, the man who set such store in an evolutionary view of the nervous system as something that was hierarchically organized in a succession of levels that had bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD CAROL SHIELDS
• INTRODUCTION ELEANOR WACHTEL
• JONATHAN MILLER
• JANE GOODALL
• BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI
• GEORGE STEINER
• DESMOND TUTU
• SUSAN SONTAG
• AMARTYA SEN
• GLORIA STEINEM
• JARED DIAMOND
• OLIVER SACKS
• JANE JACOBS
• UMBERTO ECO
• MARY DOUGLAS
• NOAM CHOMSKY
• ARTHUR C. CLARKE
• HAROLD BLOOM
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• About the Author
• Praise for Eleanor Wachtel “Eleanor
• Copyright
• About the Publisher