What With Philosophy

the business of dismantling various aspects of Cartesian dualism--the identification of some things like understanding or meaning or sensation of pain as mental processes, the supposition that we learn our internal states purely by introspection. Another is our tendency to opt for Platonist explanations in the face of problems about universals and existence of categories.

Percy Shelley remarked that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," forgetting that the main bits of legislation he and his fellow Romantics were interested in were all cribbed from the German philosophers (and William Godwin channeling them into English) whom they sat around and read to each other. He should have said philosophers. Suppose we should be successful at doing the work revealed in those three themes remarked on above. What would that do? That is, suppose we should be more subtle and careful before we should think general explanations are required, that we should be successful at dismantling dualism, that we should understand names and categories without being Platonists. These are hardly imaginable, but suppose.

Platonism first, and most cursorily: one effect of Platonism is to shift our attention from here and now, from the thing in front of us, to something apprehended, as Plato suggests in the talk of the divided line, through the intellect. I'm not saying this is bad, unless it leads us to diminish unfairly the importance of what is front of us, what is specific and individual, in favor of an unfairly inflated abstract category. I'm passing over, of course, whether we need to answer any of those questions (what makes a thing the thing it is? why do we call a thing by its name? how are we able to speak consistently across contexts?) because we don't. There are things, contexts, examples, curiosities, problems, where intellect is just what is needed, but, usually, bringing out a chair to sit on the grass is not one. We are in an intellectual discipline, and so we may sometimes be inclined to think that intellect is always relevant. We may want, though, to be cautious about that.

To the extent that I am an arrogant intellectual product of Western academic history, it has been a hard lesson that much of the academy over-values the intellectual and underestimates nonintellectual virtues. (Please do not mistake this position as a kind of anti-intellectualism--I see the insight as one I got to by hard thinking, and I hope to teach it as a philosophical result.) Our theories of human beings (economic, psychological, anthropological, sociological, philosophical models) have little to do with human lives. Among the circles of academic friends with whom I talk, we find ourselves taken aback by just about everything--by our kids' rebellions, by our own attractions, by the small satisfactions we get, from catching a trout on a fly we tied ourselves to coming over the ridge and seeing the ocean before us.

The theory of altruism leaves us baffled by instances of altruism. And there are a great many words one could substitute for "altruism" in that last sentence. The reflexive impulse to intellectualize our lives, to give a general explanation, winds up discounting these moments in which in fact we do live. Seeing them plainly and being present to them is a different matter from explaining them, as though a photographer should put down her camera and come around it into the scene. I think Wittgenstein probably had a great deal of trouble with this, but at least he recognizes it in himself. This at least raises the possibility that doing philosophy better might make us better at not discounting the particular moments in favor of the general explanation.

And dualism. My goodness. Consider some of the pathologies of dualism. We absorb dualism so deeply and so pervasively in this culture that it is like the air we breathe, so permeating our world that we cannot see it. Yet it divides and alienates for all that. Before we ever get to the mental aspects of human beings, the basic taken-for-granted part about our physical existence is an account that emphasizes separation, individuality, boundaries, countability and position and extension as though that were what we were. Human beings' bodies are bounded by their skins. Humans weigh a certain amount, should never be confused one with another, always have a particular location in space which cannot be the location of another human being at the same time no matter how much we might try, are individuals and separate. Separate from everything. Separate from the landscape, separate from the earth, separate from the universe, separate from our neighborhood and neighbors to the extent that loving them seems a paradoxical notion because it is flatly impossible. Nothing in the story about dualism overlaps with the other stories we might tell about being together or being a part of something, being in a group or family or couple or discipline or situation or church or pickle or love or neighborhood so thought I would stop by. Instead it is all about being alone and separate and divided by space from every other human being and we haven't even got to the place where we really live up there behind our eyes where we are pulling levers and shouting to the engine room. That's the other side, the mental.

The mental, especially to the extent that it is private and inaccessible to others, provides us with yet another grand set of dissociations and divisions and alienations, all in a realm that is already spectacularly separate, one that threatens to float isolated in a Never-never land beyond the reach of our friends and family. Characterizing the mental and the issues which arise in connection with the mental calls forth an array of horribly mixed metaphors. The relation of the mind to the body, however we would like to settle the philosophical problem (even mind-brain identity stories, founded on heroic denial, leave intact the