In order to comprehend the question, you must be able to entertain the proposition that “mind” is not “brain,” although they may be intimately connected. Imagine you could take a fantastic voyage inside the amazing labyrinth of a human brain, with its 10 billion neurons, trillions of connections. You would see plenty of chemical and electrical events but nowhere would you see a feeling, thought, image, hope, emotion, will, purpose, consciousness. The brain is physical, objective, public, but mind is mental, subjective, private. The problem of determining the relationship between the mental and physical is called the (intractable) “mind-body” problem. Conventional wisdom tells us that any breakthroughs in this area will come from the point of view of scientific materialism, from neurobiologists, when it is finally understood how a complicated piece of meat — the brain — can produce our rich and variegated mental life. Yet that does not vitiate the distinction, or the mystery.
A modern analytic philosopher might point out that our proclivity to assume that every name is a sign of some existing thing is part of the problem. Because we have the name “mind” we think there is some entity to which the name refers. But it really, like the old terms, “substance,” “soul,” “essence,” “being,” merely a name, a sound, signifying nothing. Thus one point scientists, philosophers, and psychologists agree is that “mind” is not an entity. It is not something you may possess like an item of property. But still we use the word “it” as if “it” was a something, since old habits die hard, and the question remains, What is it?
Thus one philosopher, the late Walter Kaufmann, calls his famous three-volume work, “Discovering the Mind.” He notes that by “mind” he means “an all inclusive term for feeling, intelligence, reason, emotion, perception and will.” He is quick to note that he is not committed to the proposition that “mind” exists (as an entity). His aim is to examine intimately nine thinkers: Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber, Freud, Adler and Jung, to understand their major contributions to our discovery of mind, personality, and self-knowledge. His heroes I think are Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud. He agrees with Goethe that “Man is his deeds” (what he does, what he has written, what he think and what he does not do), and to understand a person you must look at his development. He agrees with Nietzsche and Freud that consciousness is but a “surface” over the depth of dark and creative forces. Yet in the end he asserts again that “mind” is not a “thing” but that in the discovery of this “no-thing” — through the appreciation of the most original “minds” of our intellectual tradition — we may gain in self-knowledge, self-understanding, and the understanding of others.
Once, long ago, the “mind” was “soul,” the form of the body and principle of life. In those ancient times, it was common knowledge to think the Earth was stationary at the center of the universe, enveloped by the vault of heaven. There was harmony, and if you listened closely, you would hear the music of the spheres. Yet over time, through many revolutions, the picture has changed drastically. The heavens opened with the rise of science and humans are insignificant in the immense scheme of things. In this process, no-things like mind have lost their familiar positions in view of things, not knowing where to find their ground. Yet at the same time, this no-thing that is not nothing, lost and wondering, is still the secret of our lives and well-being. So what do you think?
Answer to last week’s puzzle:
The common item found on work-desks is an “In-Tray” and if you put an “S” before each word, you get “Sin” and “Stray.”
