Selections: Visions Of A Ghostseer

The labyrinth of modern thought is a difficult one in which the unforgiving complexities of parallel dialectical movement, seen in the divergence of idealism and materialism, can leave understanding stranded in the restricted movement of divorced specializations, and paradigms. Issues of ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ can vitiate thought, and deserve to be relegated temporarily to the sidelines, so that a practical study can get underway. We can construct our model of the eonic effect on the basis of limited foundations without deciding on key metaphysical issues. The philosophy of materialism is very ancient, for example the Indian Samkhya, and its modern reductionist form can confuse us, and often ceases to serve contemporary thought where the ideas of physical force fields, computer software, infinitesimals, and of information, move to bridge, better replace, the ancient distinctions of material and spiritual. Methodological naturalism, as current in the conduct of science, often muddles the question of ‘naturalism’ in its stances toward mind, consciousness and values, sometimes making them seem ‘spiritual’ unless subjected to reductionist revisionism. It is important to consider the often neglected potential of so-called ‘transcendental idealism’, in its Kantian version. Neither transcendental, nor quite an idealism, it is the perfect complement to Newton. This crude but effective kludge is, at the least, the perfect way to state our problem, whatever its solution.

Whatever the case, the stance of science is appropriate, and a rough and ready ‘materialistic phenomenology’ can be our starting point. But let’s declare the ‘material/spiritual’ distinction bad terminology. The ‘mind’ is not a ‘spiritual’ entity, but it doesn’t follow we can reduce it to simple mechanics. We can make no assumptions about the limits of naturalism, the nature of consciousness or self, based on reductionist preconceptions or extensions of physics. To make natural selection the de facto principle of demarcation was and is a recipe for confusion. One problem is that Western thought is stuck in Cartesianism. And this becomes worse as the attempt is made to transcend this dualism via reductionist materialism. However harebrained, Cartesianism is not worse! Kant’s transcendental idealism and the hybrid dual system of Samkhya are two ways to examine, and bypass, the frequently sterile ‘idealism versus materialism’ dialectic.

Extending the religion-science debate, we can consider various New Age perspectives inherited from antiquity and resurfacing in modern times. We can examine later the materialism, or generalized naturalism, of the classic Samkhya with its freedom from Cartesian duality. This non-theistic tradition, predating the rise of monotheism, shows how ‘spirituality’ can be cast without the material/spiritual terminology that is the source of chronic confusions and exploitations. Such literature, as it is translated into such terms, often ceases to make sense.

But the best guide here is the philosopher Kant, given also those he tacitly debates, such as Spinoza. The Cartesian self is seen as a metaphysical totality veiled from our self-representations. Agree or not, Kant is unmatched as a mediator of religious and scientific metaphysics, although he is still too theistic for our Darwinian atheist obsessive, and his system is complex, and often charged with inconsistencies. Kant, at least, does not suppress the issues in one-sided claims. His thinking bursts asunder his own rational theology lurking in the background. In an age where science education systematically avoids philosophy, it is strangely forgotten that Kant, issues of his idealism apart, with Newton at his fingertips, pronounced skeptical judgment over assumptions, material or otherwise, arbitrarily made about the ‘Big Three’, divinity, soul, and free will. We might consider them semantic quagmires one, two, and three, Q1, 2, 3. Kant came close to showing the subtle mechanization of this triad of concepts whose mastery will prove the true foundation for some future theory of evolution. His early essay, Visions of a Ghostseer, with its critique of mysticism, prefigured this classic treatment of metaphysics later addressed in his famous Critique of Pure Reason. The Preface to that Critique opens with the famous statement,

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.[i]

The Darwin debate can be taken as fully in the grip of this peculiar fate. This passage has suffered a strange fate itself. It was a challenge to metaphysics. Yet now science denounces Kant as metaphysical even as it makes the mistake indicated in Kant’s Preface. Reductionist evolution based on natural selection is as metaphysical as it gets. If Kant is seen to be wrong somewhere, we default back to this paragraph, with no science of metaphysics, and hence no science of evolution, physics generally managing to fend for itself.

The problem arises because Kant proceeded to a seemingly inconsistent viewpoint in his also famous Second Critique, dealing with ethics. Sometimes Kant is accused of being a foundationalist, and pragmatist or Nietzchean diatribes attempt to dismantle Kantian deductions or systematics. Neo-pragmatist denunciations of Kantian dualism are a current fashion, although this began with figures such as Hegel. But analytic philosophy is thrown off-track by Darwin. A seminal text here is Dewey’s book on Darwinism and philosophy. If we reject natural selection it is back to square one. We might have to proceed here without foundational deductions. And then such strictures apply to science as well.

There could be nothing more outrageous than accusing Kant of foundationalism , only to make Darwin’s theory of natural selection the single and sole foundation for universal and cosmic conclusions. The world of modern physics has led to another, perhaps in the future a better, version of all this, despite the massive denials of most physicists. One might conjecture that Kantian distinctions of the noumenal and phenomenal are early anticipations of current physical dilemmas. It is not true that realist Quantum Mechanics, for example, renders these issues obsolete. Current physics sails straight into these waters both at the quantum level, and in the issues of relativity and the speed of light. Science has a way to proceed here, but it is never used.[ii]

One approach to this confusion is to bypass the methodology of the first Critique and simply look at the real starting point, the antinomies explored in the section on Dialectic. In Kant’s first Critique, the section of the Dialectic addresses the Ideas of Reason, and the antinomies that arise in the context of the metaphysics of divinity, soul, and free will. Kant’s double-edged critique of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ finds the Darwinists disguised metaphysicians. Despite the fury of the Darwin debate, it is not Q1 (unless they adopt a reverse argument by design to claim disproof of the existence of divinity) but Q2 that is the nemesis of Darwinism. They have failed to consider the boundaries of the ‘self’. We would like very much to avoid the quagmire of ‘soul’ discussions. But we cannot, and we cannot claim selectionist theories provide proof for us here. This is a question of epistemology. There may be other approaches to the issues that don’t adopt the standards of knowledge discourse. But even a polite view of much ‘soul discourse’ shows that while soul beliefs may be justified the discourse of such is hopelessly confused. It is significant that even Buddhists speak of reaching ‘Enlightenment’, yet no discourse of such has truly resolved the question of self in closed form. We should take Kant’s warnings about divinity, soul, and free will to heart without presumptions, and be wary of any fixed assumptions in these three areas, even at the price of a fuzzy or incomplete theory.

Kant’s Third Antinomy In many ways the crux of the whole issue of theory and society is prefigured in the classic ‘Dialectic’ of Kant’s first Critique. “Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.” Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”

In terms of the first Critique, Kant is a transcendental idealist, and empirical realist. This terminology tends to throw people off-track, and is in many ways unfortunate. The usage of the term ‘transcendental’ is not the same as ‘transcendent’. Although endlessly criticized now, and despite problems, this approach has never been bettered. It is one of the most classic treatments of the ‘spiritual/material’ quagmire shared by religionists and reductionists both. It is not our intent to promote Kantianism, but it is good to aware of this classic discourse. Darwinism simply proceeds into this swamp and sinks. Despite its evasions, science cannot make a place for the formal idea of freedom, and enters an infinite loop of causal theory. Kant is taboo, and endless research is devoted to methodologies making the same mistakes. Darwinian claims for the evolution of ethics are displaced into deep time, and inferred without evidence, a novel metaphysical finesse. Kant thus remains a player here. Sorry, but it’s cash at the point of sale. It’s no use saying Darwin solved this problem if the proof is deferred to the next paradigm shift or the expectation of some future discovery of fossil bones.

At the price of a two-domain theory, Kant’s approach is unmatched for its treatment of the idea of freedom, becoming problematical for some in his stance on ‘practical reason’: to which domain belongs ‘will’, if any? It is useful to displace discourse to the idea of freedom, bypassing the theological deadlock of Q1. It is really Hegel who is the idealist, and who, in collating Q1 and Q3 attempted to counter Kant’s two-domain theory with a Spinozistic metaphysical fugue. Schopenhauer tries to restore a streamlined Kantian two-domain theory. The value, or flaw, of the Kantian approach is its self-limitation: the two-domain theory produces the noumenal and phenomenal distinction, careful to deal only with what it knows.

Many will attempt to recast this as the spiritual/material divide, and many dissenting critiques exist of this in current analytic philosophy, or the philosopher Nietzsche, but it remains a benchmark, against which we can measure most other theories. The issue of dualism and its debates distract attention. Like the tip of an iceberg, we see a dualism, supposedly, of the visible tip and the invisible part. There is a dualism, yes, between tip and whole, or, no, there is no dualism, only one iceberg. Although our approach diverges from this formulation, being about history, and certainly doesn’t intend to be fooled by the rational theology that Kant almost too fairly withdraws into a systematic skepticism next to the demand for autonomy, that theology of reason should be a caution to the fanaticism of monotheists entangled in the legitimation strategies of theistic mythologies of domination. Since it would be a five-minute exercise to unscrew the Kantian formulation from its sockets and recast it in the fashion of someone like Schopenhauer, we might simply pause in respect for a potential contribution to the crisis of religion that never survived its birth in the press of propagandas.

Version .9: temporal evolution of theory We neglect the possibility that since we are immersed in our own evolution, we cannot resolve its metaphysical issues unless we have concluded this evolution. We may be observing intermediate phases where freedom as an aspect of behavior is still ambiguous. We should note that since theories of evolution are themselves embedded in a greater historical evolution, any final theory must answer to, or resolve, the antinomies of self, and will, i.e. a definition of an organism. But theory is unable to do this, define its own fundamental unit, hence the endless temporal delay, and dialectical oscillation, of any such theory. Therefore there is, as yet, no theory of evolution. Our strategy is to close on the eonic effect, without commitment to the three antinomies. Thus, for the time being, we will adopt no theory that forces the issue on divinity, self, and free will. The eonic model happens fast, and we will be done before the majestic date on which the relevant proofs emerge in time. Our model should, like software, be marked Version .9, the final Version 1.0 forever estimated for the ‘end times’ of the Final Theory. Thus our theory is itself embedded in some form of evolution (we will soon see which one).

Kant and his followers the teleomechanists ought to be included in any account of the history of biology. Swept away in the tide of Darwinism this early methodology demanded a close attention to the question of teleology and mechanics. Unfortunately, Kant has also become a defining figure in the emergence of classical liberalism . His classic essay, Idea For A Universal History , introduces the idea of ‘asocial sociability’ and the resemblance of this conceptual nexus to a kind of proto-Darwinian theory of social conflict matched with the economic materialism of Adam Smith has even left some to the propaganda ploy of claiming Kant anticipates Darwin! It is easy to show how the eonic effect resolves the ambiguity latent in Kant’s historical thinking.

Thus, E. O. Wilson, who is at least clear that Kant is no precursor of Darwin, and after a diatribe against Kantian muddle, in his Consilience takes an extreme view of the issues, in part because of the assumption natural selection is established:

If the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics.[iii]

This view of the question will always sink on its maiden voyage. The public is not required to join in another round of this charge of the light brigade straight into Q3, and we should wonder why after so many failures scientists are still intent on trying. It is much simpler to accept reality, that value-free theories can’t do values, and that there is no value-free science of such. Let’s assume, however, we could mechanize this duality. It would be like an on-off switch. We can try to explain the switch, but we can’t eliminate the device itself, to produce a theory about a switch that denies its existence in a dualism of continuity and discontinuity. The term ‘naturalistic fallacy’ was always misleading here. The fallacy is no doubt real, but we should challenge this terminology ‘naturalistic’, for it doesn’t follow that the issue is one of nature versus ‘non-nature’.

Darwinism, we can see already, because of its concealed metaphysical ambition, and claims for ‘universal science’, is thrashing about miserably in Q1, 2, 3, claiming that natural selection resolves them. And nothing can relieve this confusion with the theory in its current form. Its claims about divinity (if any) are challenged by monotheists, its claims about ‘self’ by yogis (among others), and its claims about ‘freedom’ (if any) resolve, as we will see, to a particular ideology of social action. Actually, Darwinists are not so unreasonable as near Kantians, and take intelligent stances here in many cases, and it is only the misuse of selectionist theory that is a problem.

The problem is the implied resolution of Q2, using natural selection. The floodgates of scientism open and we have ethics derived from population genetics, next to implied ‘proof’ of the non-existence of soul. This is pure metaphysics in disguise. The point is that the implied negative affirmations on these issues are often taken as established, when they can be no more than disguised metaphysical assumptions. To construct a science of history we would need a science of metaphysics. But we do not have decision procedures on our three key questions. If Kant’s science of metaphysics fails, these issues will stand unresolved. The point is that natural selection is not a decision procedure on these issues. The reason is that we have not properly correlated the emergence of self with actual data of natural selection. The clear projection of a metaphysical thesis onto an unseen totality triggers the Kantian alarm bell.

Notice then that Darwinists tend to make fixed assumptions on all three of our questions, small wonder the tenacity of the Darwin debate. Darwinism is really a ship that has taken three direct hits, but always stays afloat due to the artificial respiration of sophistry or assumptions about what science will discover in the future, based on assumptions about what reductionism or natural selection ought to be able to explain, if science is to explain everything. We will construct an ‘evolution of freedom’ argument to try and trap the Darwinist in a discrepancy, if not contradiction, over freedom and necessity.

In summary, we should note that the questions of metaphysics forever haunt any form of macrohistorical reasoning, and this applies to the descent of man, and we need to stay clear of the ‘dialectic of illusion’, by using sage concepts that do not precipitate contradictions. In fact, we will embrace one such contradiction explicitly, that of freedom and necessity, and use the two ideas in tandem in a generalized empirical model.

Kant’s ethical theory Since ‘history’ is not a moral agent (although ‘evolution’ will be found to braid facts and values), the question of Kantian ethics is not our subject, and we should note that the original form of the Third Antinomy was cosmological, and we are thus more Kantian than Kant, even as our analysis of historical laws and their antinomies falls short of a derivation of Kantian moral thinking. Kant’s elaborate constructs here tend to veil the obvious insight into the place of the idea of freedom in a causal science. No more is needed for our purpose. That said, a project of parallel study of Kant’s discourses on ethics is highly useful as we proceed, and it should be recommended, in its complexity.

Kant’s ethical thinking has been dismantled so many times by irate secular critics that it is a miracle the way it forever resurfaces in its stodgy and contradictory grandeur. The reason is obvious from Nietzsche’s attempt to sweep away the apparatus of the noumenal with a spurious ‘will to power’ (in a form of thinking with a concealed influence of Darwin, no less). The strength of Kant’s attempt to scale the impossible summit is that it benchmarks the problem to be solved, that noone can solve, man’s peculiar fate. It is the perfect foil for amateur secularists, and is really about a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the possibility of freedom in the context of Newton.

We need make no assumptions about Kant’s success in his endeavor to see that Kant’s system, should we consider it problematical, or refuted, still defaults to the way we take ethical action, and is a statement of the nature of the problem we must solve. And its construct of transcendental idealism stands as a challenge to any claim to reduce freedom to causal thinking. It accurately describes our actual behavior, as we confront spontaneous ‘myths of self-will’ before the silent unseen, our noumenal being or self. The great religions carry disorderly versions of this ancient baggage with honest muddle into an age of scientism determined to rationalize what cannot be so rationalized in a causal scheme. We cannot endorse the total rejection seen in a figure such as Nietzsche, who wishes to scrap the whole apparatus of transcendental idealism for his ‘genius spree’ armed with some intoxicating notion of the ‘will to power’ as ‘all there is’. It’s fine to get drunk once in a while, but you are responsible for the consequences. If we encounter difficulties in a Kantian discourse, the fact remains that all the pieces of the puzzle are present in Kant, viz. a fundamental concept of ‘will’, at metaphysical risk, in relation to the defining standard of what we mean by a human organism. If we cannot resolve these contradictions, we must still live them.

The postulates of practical reason in Kant’s moral theory raise issues that simply won’t disappear with facile conversion to a fashionable atheism. In fact, Kant, a curious sort of dialectical atheist/theist, speaks better to the secular skeptic than the religionist. Secular critics have lost the dialectical knack to see Kant’s point here. Thus the question of ‘soul’ or ‘free will’, far more than the exhausted shibboleths of divinity, are cogently brought back to some consideration from the oblivion of Kant’s metaphysical destructions, and we must, to examine, for example, the history of Buddhism, make no prior assumptions about the claimed empirical facts of ‘reincarnation’, however great the absurdity these make of Darwinian assumptions of organism. Kant’s generic thinking, in his postulates, is thus not so easily rejected by the secularist (who ought not to be making, in any case, a reverse theology of scientism as his defining ideology). We must remain ‘free and loose’ in a dialectical movement, with a de facto non-theism that is liberated from the pall of theological discourse.

Self, Soul, and Reincarnation We see immediately where Darwin goes wrong. His theory assumes that ‘self’ is resolved as a construct of natural selection (apparently, Darwinists never really see the problem). But we can make no such assumption, for the self, in Kantian terms, may have an unseen aspect not subject to the causality of phenomena, beyond space and time. Modern positivistic scientism is adamant in the denial of such a possibility, but millennia of yogis and Buddhists should give us pause. Kant with great profundity tried to rescue science from reductionist deletions of the unknown dimensions of man. In fact, theories of evolution consistently fail to define the ‘organism’ at all. This is a disaster for scientific foundationalism. We can no longer forbid Buddhists their thinking here, based on epistemology at least. It can’t be helped. That is not an endorsement. Once New Agers get started, at the green light, the nonsense about reincarnation is unending. But this historical stream of rumor speaks from a deeper tradition that sees the organism as a temporal transient with respect to a timeless totality. The implications of transcendental idealism allow this possibility.

We cannot find resolutions of Q1, 2, 3. But Q2 leaves us suspicious. Man’s evolutionary experiences consistently come down on the positive for self, or soul. These issues concern the dilemma of the knowable, of epistemology. False beliefs are no doubt rampant, a New Age chaos. We would like to help, clamp down on superstition. But we cannot therefore know that we don’t have a soul, for example, just because epistemology is at fault. It could go either way. What’s more, scientists slyly dip into this goblet, the question of soul is like the issue of a computer program, an intangible entity associated with a mechanical assembly. In that sense discourse on soul is both inevitable and justified. But the deeper question remains, and Kant’s critiques can be helpful here. The Himalayas are filled with yogis who see their past lives, they claim, and have a special name for those rare beings who achieve such knowledge. Supposedly. How would we know? Our only concern is to remain neutral in constructing our argument, which can’t depend on assumptions here, but threatens to do so in any balanced study of something like the history of Buddhism. We will take no stand on reincarnation here, but the probability is that an entire dimension is missing in current scientific accounts. That said, most of the discourse in this field, even the best in the Buddhist tradition, is wildly unreliable.

In a scientific culture brain and mind are assumed without proof to be identical, figures such as Eccles and Popper being significant dissenters. We should be tolerant both ways, of reductionist hotheads who make provisional assumptions to explore new knowledge, and foolish enough to wish to download the mind onto a computer. In the age of genetics this reductionist view seems to some to be on the verge of demonstration, but science is always on the verge here, although this research might hopefully allow us to restate or clarify some old confusions in a genetic context.

The confusion lies in the scrambled usage of the terms ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. In fact, the terms are almost meaningless as used, hence warning us to be wary of denying soul, disaster in reverse. As we go along we will look briefly at the classic (non-denominational) Samkhya materialism of the tradition of

India

. This tradition is interesting because everything is ‘material’ in some sense of ‘material’ or ‘samsaric’ phenomenology, and the shades of human consciousness in a vast spectrum fall naturally within the scope of ‘material or natural phenomenology’. There is state beyond soul to which a name is only reluctantly given, turiya. This means the ‘fourth’, and these discourses speak of four states, sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, and a fourth. Samkhya enjoins liberation from soul as a ‘material condition’ in some sense (?!). The confusion arises because we tend to think ‘transcendent’ simple realities, e.g. mind, which can’t find reductionist accounts in current science. These yogis learned the hard way that much talk of ‘spirit’ is just that talk, and that even mystical states are phenomenological, far short of their destination. They couldn’t afford the luxury of religious fantasies.

Schopenhauer and death In the wake of Kant the philosopher Schopenhauer produced a brilliant, streamlined version of transcendental idealism. We might cite a passage from Dale Jacquette’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, remarkable for revealing the latent potential of ‘transcendental idealism’.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy often gives the impression of having been composed expressly for the purpose of reconciling the phenomenal will to the inevitability of death. All the apparatus of his main treatise, the fundamental distinction between the world as Will and representation, the concept of thing-in-itself as beyond the principium individuationis, and fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, can be understood as contributing to a moral, metaphysical and mystical religious recognition that death is nothing real and hence nothing to fear. If Schopenhauer is correct, he proves that death is not an event, and hence altogether unreal. Death is not an event in the world as representation, but is rather an endpoint or limit of the world as representation, and in particular in the first-person formulation as my representation. The world as representation begins and ends with the consciousness of the individual representing subject. At the moment of death, all representation comes to an immediate abrupt end, after which there remains only thing-in-itself. An individual’s death is not something that occurs in or as any part of the world as representation. Nor can death possibly be in or a part of the world as thing-in-itself or Will. There are no events or individuated occurrences, nothing happening in space or time, for thing-in-itself, and in particular there is no progressive transition from life to death or from consciousness to unconsciousness. If with Schopenhauer we assume that there exists only the world as representation and as thing-in-itself interpreted as Will, then there is no place on either side of the great divide for death, no possibility for the existence or reality of death.[iv]

The connection between science, transcendental idealism, and the issues of the nature of the organism stand out in an especial clarity in this passage, which shows the key to an evolutionary psychology that reconciles the hopeless confusions of degenerated mysticism in the context of a philosophy tailored to the context of science.

The missing software manual Along with the problem of Version .9 of the theory, we also have problem of the missing human software manual. Who am I and how do I work? No manual for this has ever been produced, although Schopenhauer, less his metaphysics of will, comes close, as he serendipitously restates the essence of many classic sutras for a modern age. One of the more difficult aspects of Kantian discourse lies in the transition from the first to second Critiques. There practical reason comes to the fore as a seeming contradiction to what has been established in the first Critique. And here an ‘issue’ of faith seems to arise in relation to the ethical will. Kant must speak for himself here, but in our thinking we can see the dilemma arising: we have no ability to produce an account of the real psychology of man. But our software suggests that a factor of ‘will’ is called for to give meaning to what is plainly in front of us. We can truncate the factor of will, and yet the result is not a full account of man, what to say of a theory of the evolution of man. Kant offers a way to deal with this, and the Indian sutras another. So man suffers a severe limitation, and can’t easily even produce a proper software manual for his own function. Beware of the ready market for such manuals. They are dime a dozen. The better ones are the Indian sutras, but these are simply procedural more than philosophical. They say, do this, then maybe… And they produce their own extravaganza, deserving a Kantian treatment. Kant with a brilliant wisdom and ruthless self-discipline reaches the limit with his discourse on ‘apperception’, and then simply stops. Kant shows the way to modernize those sutras.

Notes toward an eonic sutra: Self-consciousness The distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness is very ancient and useful for our purposes, for it allows a bridge between science, history, and the evolutionary psychologies of many ancient traditions. It tends to die out in normal discourse. It can also rescue us from the metaphysics of mysticism. We can adopt a lightweight ‘pidgin sutra’ approach to this theme of self-consciousness, in a generalized usage that can be passepartout between cognitive science, a Buddhist discourse (where it is always present in some form), and anything else. It is not good to hybridize these different things, but our usage can embrace all of them as objects of examination.

Despite the problem of free will, we have one work-around. We can use the classic distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness to construct a surrogate ‘will’. We attempt to construct an idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’ and this will be seen in the context of the contradiction of freedom and determinism. This takes the form of seeing the ‘will’ as an almost virtual consideration, its self-understanding being an embedded aspect of its own evolution. Note that man speaks of will but seldom shows this feature, like software installed but rarely used. He is stranded with an intellectual idea of ‘will power’ that goes nowhere, is powerless, for reasons a Schopenhauerian analysis might illuminate. The most that he can do it seems is to act in brief intervals of self-consciousness to change direction, and this mimics ‘will’. Thus this barely active factor of will takes the form of the distinctions or shades of consciousness, or self-consciousness, which carry for all intents and purposes some element of will. This amounts to saying that our consciousness can be transformed as self-consciousness, which can elicit momentary actions that look like free will (you have that experience twenty times a day). But in this approach we can define self-consciousness within the realm of nature. In fact, that is probably how the history of man’s freedom and self-evolution occur. This self-consciousness is a demonstrable aspect of man’s evolutionary psychology, and occurs as the ‘moment of attention’ standing beyond the stream of consciousness. Thus instead of ‘free will’, we can proceed with volition, as ‘moments of attention’. In general, the functions of choice and self-direction can be taken as is in terms of psychological processes open to historical description, with or without a scientific description of their functionality. What the software does requires no ‘machine language’, so to speak.

Students of Kant will of course wish to adopt his stance on free will in relation to morality and other questions. But our approach, at a more primitive level, is optionally compatible here, in the sense that free will in the Kantian meaning would always act via ‘self-consciousness’ at the boundary of the awareness. We will adopt no stance on Kantian moral theory except to note later the way the ‘idea of freedom’ in our model will suffer a similar ambiguity in the sense of ‘historically realizable freedom’ versus some deeper level of the same.

The genetic revolution Our argument is based on a critique of natural selection. That is all. Much of the Darwin debate centers on issues of genetic determinism and the nature of behavior. The abuses of the sociobiologists are an object of considerable debate. We need to learn from genetics and be able to change gears a little as this research continues. But our stance on the issue of ‘self-consciousness’ allows us to do this from two angles, bridge two extreme opposites. However, the results of new genetic discoveries are taken as disproof of Cartesian assumptions, proof of the non-existence of soul, and much else. We are certainly not going to defend Cartesian assumptions, but the reductionist approach has also failed. Spouting DNA jargon is not proof of the non-existence of self or soul. Whatever the case, the issue of self-consciousness will always survive the debates over genetic determinism. It is like software. What the software does, and how it works, are two different things. We cannot use mechanical arguments to deny word processing capabilities in a program of that type. Yet we often make this kind of mistake in debates over genetic determinism.

No stance on genetic determinism is absolutely required here (although this presses the case close to edge). Genetic determination of some kind is not the same as genetic determinism. We can be inconsistent and continue non-genetic enquiries into soul, and then turn around and wait for genetic research to move into this realm, or not. “Or not” may prove to be the state of our existence, we may never be able to resolve these questions via genetics. But we need to be wary of reductionist dogmatism.

Genetic determinism is not an evolutionary question, as such. Darwin could be wrong about his theory and genetic determinism could still be the case by another theory. The reader will be surprised to see that while we bring in a lot of discourse on freedom, no claims of free will are necessary for the argument. Please also note that no stance on free will is required by the efforts to perform ‘meditation’ Buddhist-style. Lurking in the background is the master discourse, Kantian style, of the evolutionary psychologies of the ‘will’, and these are one peak of human psychology.

However, the stance of pure genetic determinism is actually weak, and many biologists are critical here. The research has not matured. As Kant notes, why would the moral freedom software be there at all if it were superfluous? Actually, everyone’s computer has a lot of software they don’t use, so that’s not conclusive. It is also possible the idea of freedom, in potential, is part of our evolution, as we will see in the next chapters. We don’t need free will to think about freedom. This evolution in potentia might be our current condition. Note that our distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness remains invariant one way or the other. Nothing in genetic deterministic thinking could ever abrogate this distinction. Thus we can still use the term ‘freedom’ in this context regardless of the apparent contradiction. None of this rejects any of the new and exciting discoveries of DNA research.

[i] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Stephen Körner, Kant (New York: Penguin, 1960), Susan Shell, The Embodiment of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). As Y. Yovel notes, “...the name of Kant comes to mind as a companion and counterpart to Spinoza. Despite their otherwise great differences, here they meet on common ground. Both use the critique of religion to purify the mind of false images and to eliminate the social and institutional obstacles built upon them. Moreover, both use biblical hermeneutics to divert their audience’s transcendent dispositions toward an immanent religion of man. Kant, however, in spite of his radical critique of religion, cannot be called a philosopher of immanence without qualification. In respect to knowledge Kant takes the position of critical immanence, and in this he ends up in a transcendent position that opposes an Is/Ought dualism to Spinoza’s naturalism. Yet Kant remains attached to the principle of immanence in what counts most, for in establishing the foundations of the natural and the moral world he allows no appeal to a power or authority over and above man”, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 6. Allen Wood, Kant’s Rational Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

[ii] David Hildebrand, Beyond Realism and Antirealism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003).

[iii] Edward Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 251.

[iv] Dale Jacquette, The Philosophy of Schopenhaur (Kingston: Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).