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Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures)
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| Part No: | 0300145187 |
| Manufacturer: | Yale University Press |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 3.5 / 5.0 |
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- ISBN13: 9780300145182
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality. By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate. (20100605)
| To force the mind to do its own thinking | 2010-07-23 | 5 / 5 |
| It was Whitehead, as I recall, who said, "The sole purpose of reading is to force the mind to do its own thinking." Absence of Mind can do that. Whether you agree with the premises, observations and conclusions may be less important than that this book can, if you read it, without prejudice, intent on considering her journey through human nature and the exploration of what it is to be fully human.
My five is the result of a three (for content) plus a two for her causation of me to consider possibilities I would not have explored in idle moments.
The only thing missing, for me, is a recommended reacing list to augment her revelations of the "read with caution" examples. |
| Attacking scientism instead of Darwinism? | 2010-07-16 | 3 / 5 |
| Although this book begins with a challenge to the 'postmodern atheists' who use science to debunk religion, it soon turns into an historical critique of positivism. And this aspect of the book is of great value, save only that the author adopts a tactic of indirection to do this: an older generation of critics of Darwinism often attacked sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, leaving the core theory of Darwin intact. The same strategy seems to be at work here. We are treated to an interesting expose of scientism, but then one prinicple culprit is left intact. This novel perspective built around the idea of parascience breaks new ground, but is in the end misleading.
This spoils the argument, and the important discussion of altruism is left stranded as an example of postivistic parascience. But the point here is not just that positivism deprives the discussion of a 'self' but that Darwinian evolution cannot on the basis of the theory of natural selection account for altruism at all. The very arcane argument of Hamilton on kin selection (next to the parallel tradition of group selection) is a tour de force, but the simple and devastating answer is, so what? The foundation for the argument is a fallacy, and cannot distinguish the spectrum of ethical conditions of which altruism is but a particular aspect. The obsession with altruism as the core 'ethic' to be explained by explaining it away is a curious symptom of Darwinism pathology as a kind of dumbed down economic ideology in disguise, attempting to legitimate the 'selfishness' proposed by Adam Smith as economically dynamic. This ideological corruption is what seems to lie behind the whole focus on altruism by scientists determined to degrade its meaning. Here Robinson's challenge on the grounds of parascience is absolutely cogent, yet fails to go the whole mile and reject the sophistical junk science of mathematicized selectionism made into a tricky-dick theory of unselfish behavior. Bascially the game is that selfishness is made to explain unselfishness, in the vein of scientific nihilism.
Thus Robinson's stance is unclear here. To challenge Darwin directly is a fast way to not sell a book, so the suspicion is the strategy is the one of indirection to forestall the fate of Darwin critics.
That is a reminder that bestsellers are almost certainly not going to challenge Darwin, that we must turn to the underground (not ID) literature on evolution/scientism to get real answers.
Despite the great interest of this analysis, we need to be done with Darwinism at this point: it needs to be exposed directly. And that expose would be a prime instance of Robinson's argument.
Interesting book in any case, but be suspicious that authors, and I am not yet including Robinson, will fib on Darwinian issues for monetary gain.
Speaking generally, Robinson is quite correct to show the way that modern science cannot handle a 'self'. The point should be considered in the light of Kant. Her last chapter on Freud is cogent here also, although Freud is the much debunked themetic of a past generation now. It is however worth considering the roots of Freud in fin de siecle distortions of Schopenhauer, leading us back to Kant, once again.
The philosopher Kant exposed the whole game of 'Newtonism' now the positivism in Robinson's discussion, and provides the classic answer in his transcendental idealism, which is more in tune with science than the religious traditionalism that seems to lurk behind the book's challenge to science.
The solution to the problem was produced in the Enlightenment, and not so very well by defenders of religion who tend to make scientists double down in their 'parascience'. |
| A Missed Opportunity | 2010-07-15 | 1 / 5 |
| My acquaintance with Marilynne Robinson's work has previously been limited to fiction, specifically her novel Gilead, for which she won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and "Kansas," a superb distillation of Gilead's take on Midwestern Protestant thinking and abolitionist activism in the 19th century. Both have a great deal to recommend them in terms of style and food for thought. So I looked forward to Absence of Mind, her Terry Foundation lectures on religion in the light of science and philosophy, delivered at Yale University.
The four essays comprising Absence of Mind address one of the great challenges facing children of the Enlightenment. To state it in my words, not Robinson's: Before god was dead, there remained a subjective impression of communion between god and me. I was not ultimately alone. But among the costs of technological society has been an elevation of "objective" knowledge and thought to such an extent that other modes of experience are now routinely excluded from serious intellectual consideration. Is it too great a stretch to suggest that existential panic might fuel militant attitudes among religious fundamentalists around the world? Or the wearing of factual ignorance as a political badge of honor by some American social conservatives?
Robinson begins by pretending to concede that the "universe is devoid of theological implication" and that "life is simply another instance of matter working through the permutations available to it." She seeks to turn the arguments of her positivist opponents--who are guilty of practicing a pejoristic neologism she labels "parascience"--against them, and thereby rediscover mind. This strategy is questionable at best. Subjectivity or awareness (immediately experienced as my mind) and empiricism (the methodology of science) are manifestations of processes as disparate as breathing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance aloud. Breathing is required to perform the recitation, but breathing isn't discoverable by parsing the words of the Pledge. My mind is undeniably present to me. Can't we start from there?
The essays caused me further disquiet by deriding "either/or" arguments while engaging in them--Robinson's often exceed the bounds of credulity. Under a dazzle of complex verbiage there's also a fair bit of sleight-of-hand. She actually proposes that the variously described behavioral disorders affecting Phineas Gage, after an iron bar was blasted through his head in 1848, may have been due to the insult to his humanity rather than his brain. She compares Gage to peg-leg Captain Ahab. Since Ahab also behaved badly, she quips sarcastically, why not suppose that behavioral regulation is a function of the leg? Perhaps she'd also like to suggest that the speech difficulties common to stroke victims with lesions in the distribution of the left middle cerebral artery are not due to those lesions, but rather to the fact that having a stroke is a bummer? Please. Only someone desperate to posit a mind (soul) totally separable from body could swallow such twaddle. And only then if they flunked Science 101.
The lectures conclude with a grand implausibility argument. (There ought to be a name for this particular fallacy. Maybe there is.) The game runs like this. Imagine the zillions of improbable things that had to happen in a particular way to result in me and my being here, in this place, at this time, typing on the keyboard of a fantastically complicated piece of technology, etc. What are the odds? Isn't it more likely that a higher intelligence is at work? Not so fast. Since I do in fact exist in this moment, I must be somewhere doing something; why not this?
More importantly, arguing backward from present circumstance to primordial ooze is a fool's errand or a route to willful failure. Moby Dick is not predictable from cuneiform writing circa 2000 BCE. Does this mean god wrote Moby Dick? Maybe not if one follows developments in the order of their occurrence, from Sumer to Melville's writing desk. Do paradigm shifts and other revolutionary factors emerge to alter language and thought along the way to Pittsfield, MA? Yes, in droves. Is there evidence of intelligence? Certainly, but earthly intelligence acting over millennia is sufficient to the case. Valid arguments, unlike simple arithmetic equations, may not work the same in both directions. Nor is this asymmetry uncommon. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything may be 42, but which among a vast number of plausible contenders was the ultimate question?
Robinson could have done so much better for the cause of mind. Had she been willing to question her traditional religious (Christian) worldview and certainty about the existence of a unitary "self," she might, for instance, have thought to mine the riches of her own observation: "we do indeed continuously stand apart from ourselves, appraising." Instead she takes the beaten path to Descartes and a climactic appeal to our sense of wonder and mystery. Perhaps she had no other choice, having failed miserably to win the reasoned arguments she set for herself against the tyranny of Reason she so legitimately decries.
With few exceptions--such as the idea that reductionist commentators in science may yet be defending against a return of the bad old pre-Enlightenment days--I regret to report that Absence of Mind succeeds mainly as a cautionary tale about how not to build a case for the value of subjectivity.
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| I love smart, wise people | 2010-07-15 | 5 / 5 |
| | Fantastic book by a very learned writer. Her points are well made and erudite---she reminded me of Christopher Hitchens, but from the metaphysical side---very smart and thoughtful. |
| Interesting analysis, but very flawed | 2010-07-13 | 2 / 5 |
| Interesting argument from Marilynne. However, there is an important point that eludes her. I think everyone agrees these often metaphysically posed questions are very important. Why does the universe exist? Why does it seem so precisely tuned? What is its cause, its purpose? All great minds have considered these questions, and often engaged in metaphysics while doing so. They are philosophical wanderings in areas we do not yet understand, questions as yet unanswerable. But answers to these questions are no more graspable by metaphysics than they are by science, and it is only through the latter that all our moderns comforts and technologies are afforded.
The methodologies of metaphysical or religious thinking and science are naturally opposed to one another. They require different standards of evidence, and our degree of certainty in their respective conclusions reflects this. It is curious that those regions we trust to metaphysics or religion are precisely those currently unanswered by science. We cannot disregard the many noble contributions to the sphere of human thought by the study of ethics or the pondering of philosophical questions, but one cannot discover fundamental truths about the universe while doing so. Metaphysics is too ambitious towards these ends, and suffers a lack of credibility as a result. This is one reason why science and religion/ metaphysics are naturally in conflict. Pursued to their ends, they arrive at different conclusions. |
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