The
Human Person: Animal and Spirit.
By DAVID BRAINE. Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.
xxv + 555 pp. $32.95
(cloth).
Any study in philosophical anthropology that rejects both materialism and
dualism, and seeks to set forth a "holistic" alternative, may be met
in many quarters with some skepticism today--especially if that alternative
seeks to accommodate itself to religious teaching regarding the soul's continued
existence after death. For, it will
be asked, on the one hand, how can it deny that the esse of the human
being ceases at death (538) without affirming some sort of dualism? and, on the
other hand, unless it is some sort of soft-headed New Age philosophy (which this
most certainly is not), how can it sustain its claim to "holism" while
rejecting the monolithic materialism of those whom Walker Percy once described
as our "brain engineers, neuropharma-cologists, and chemists of the
synapses"? The challenge is
"how to produce an account which allows the human person to continue
existing after death, and even to have body restored to it, while remaining
completely faithful to the insight that it belongs to human nature to be
bodily," and, at the same time, to "avoid re-erecting the soul into a
complete substance." (xix)
The peculiar obstacle faced by such a project is the pervasive proclivity
towards reductionism in modern accounts of human nature stemming from the
impress of both materialism and dualism. Both
analyze the human person into an aggregate of parts in certain relations, the
behavior of the whole being the result of the interactions of these parts.
"In all this the materialist has exactly the same picture as the
dualist. Indeed, unless the mental
can first be represented as inner, logically independent of anything in the
'outer man' and the 'world', there is no way in which it can be identified with
a brain-process or state." (3) So
whether one thinks of the mind as an independent entity (as in dualism), or not
(as in materialism), the body is left to be accounted for by the brain engineers
and their aggregates of physiological, anatomical, neurological, and chemical
causes. And since materialism
involves no complicating questions about causal interaction between the physical
and the mental (as in dualism), it is usually preferred on grounds of its
simplicity--all causation being subsumed, monologically, under the physical.
In this ambitious tome, David Braine, a
philosopher at the University of Aberdeen, offers a thoroughgoing analysis and
critique of such views, whereby he undertakes to overturn these ways of viewing
human nature and to offer a holistic alternative. He sets forth a framework for understanding things like
perceiving, doing, and speaking as irreducibly the acts of the psychosomatically
integrated beings to which we normally attribute them--an understanding that
conforms to the ordinary experience of such acts in ourselves and in others.
He seeks to expose how materialist arguments repeat the mistakes of the
dualists by reducing human beings (and other animals) to their aggregate parts,
segmented sequences, and their interrelations.
He takes issue with the arguments of recent analytical philosophers (such
as Davidson and Dummett) in detail, and sets forth a holistic alternative--both
with respect to the human person as "animal" and as
"spirit."
As to the human as "animal,"
Braine notes, accordingly, that "it is the bodily animal being as such, not
just its mind, which is an 'I', a 'he or she', a focalized subject in relation
to the world. The primary reason
why human behaviour cannot be simulated by a computer does not lie in things
special to human beings, but in the fact that this focalized psychophysical
structure which they share with the higher animals cannot be thus
simulated." (5) As to the
human as "spirit," it is language, both in its complexity and
flexibility, he says, that serves as the defining feature, differentiating human
beings from other animals. This is
not to "name some property (say intellectuality) independent of being an
animal . . . but to name that particular form of intellectuality which fits
human beings as animals." (351)
Braine divides his work into two
halves, the first devoted to the human as "animal," the second to the
human as "spirit." In the
first part, he explores the nature of psychophysical unity in acts of
perception, intentionality and action, which he regards as essentially the same
for human and non-human animals alike. In
the second part, he examines the particular human transcendence revealed in
language, yet continuing to insist that even linguistic acts exhibit an animal
form of intellectuality that call for holistic understanding.
His last two chapters take up alternative views of how linguistic
behavior may be viewed as betokening human transcendence of the body and
continued existence (even if not as a "complete substance") after
bodily death.
A unique feature of Braine's approach
is the way he combines the insights and modes of analysis of both the
ordinary-language and phenomenological traditions with perceptive formulations
of the Aristotelian and Thomistic positions.
The fact that he is able to make philosophical bedfellows of the likes of
Wittgenstein, Ryle and Austin, on the one hand, with Husserl, Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty, on the other--or, at least, to make cobelligerents of them
against the common foes of dualism and materialism--is a feat in itself.
That he manages to bring together these two historically quite
independent traditions with the no-less-independent Aristotelian-Thomistic
tradition in order to develop fresh, insightful formulations of old, familiar
problems, is even more remarkable. The
whole multi-perspectival project seems to be focussed and animated by the
assumption that the modes of analysis of phenomenology and ordinary-language are
united in the approach of St. Thomas, who appeals to our phenomenal experience
of acts of perceiving and thinking, as well as to the ordinary language by which
we describe and refer to such acts. The
result is a fascinating and provocative conjunction of traditionally unrelated
approaches.
Braine's basic thesis is that the human
being (and other higher animals) cannot be understood properly as an aggregate
of parts in certain relations, but only as a subject and agent.
Likewise, human and animal activity cannot be understood properly as an
aggregate of segmented events--as chains of physiological, anatomical, neuro-chemical
or psychological occurrences. Rather,
it can be understood only when seen holistically--as "focalized" and
discharged by centers of consciousness "in such a way that it can be
attributed to such centers of consciousness and in such a way that consciousness
enters into, not only the description, but also the explanation of the
behavior." (4) This is not to deny that operations such as perceiving,
acting, or speaking do not involve constituent parts, but only that such
operations cannot be understood as "focalized" acts of living subjects
so long as they are approached as aggregates of independent events.
The constituent parts of such operations, once isolated, no longer retain
the same identity they had as parts of the integrated whole of the
"focalized" act-life of the living agent.
In Part One, this translates into the
interesting argument that the material or physical aspect of animal and human
life lacks self-sufficiency and has no existence or intelligibility apart from
the animating principle traditionally attributed to the soul (which leads Braine
to embrace a non-dualistic conception of "soul" whereby other animals
may be understood as also having souls, somewhat after the fashion of ancient
Hebraic conceptions). Any
reductionist attempt to explain the act-life of living agents by exclusive
reference to independent material (or mental!) operations threatens to destroy
their psychophysical unity. For
example, it could dissolve the integral act of perception into, first, a
"perceptual experience" conceived as something entirely
"interior" to the mind or brain, then into "external"
occurrences in the sense organs and physical world, and, finally, into a causal
relation between these.
Against such tendencies, Braine seeks
to reveal the animating principle that serves to integrate all such constituent
elements in the animal and human esse.
Thus, to stick with the perceptual example, the subsidiary physical
processes involved in seeing--in the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain--remain
"internal" to the act of seeing and therefore unnoticed by the
subject. Even as Aristotle and St.
Thomas observed, such physiological processes are not themselves the object of
perceptual consciousness, nor even ordinarily available to our consciousness.
What we are conscious of is simply the perceived object itself.
The "internal" physiological processes are subsumed typically
into an integrated act whose animating principle (anima) traditionally
has been called the "soul"--though it should not be viewed as an
independent entity and, if Braine is right, is no less evident in other higher
animals than in humans. "The
animal or human being is a 'focalized subject', not in having a head, brain,
soul, or mind as a focal centre within it, but in having its relations with the
world . . . focalized upon it as an anima, a psychological subject, as
such undivided and indivisible." (318)
What is true of perception is largely
the case with intentional actions such as walking someplace. The subsidiary physical processes involved in walking--in the
nervous system, muscles, joints, motion of our feet--are "internal" to
the act of walking. They are
subsumed into an integrated act, which is focalized by an intended end.
Ordinarily, we are not directly aware of these aggregate processes, as
becomes evident the moment we try concentrating our attention on the movement of
our feet as we run down a flight of stairs and nearly trip over ourselves.
When the subsidiary processes become detached from the intended end to
which they are ordinarily subordinated, they literally dis-integrate.
On the other hand, we become aware of our agency in an act such as
walking, not through direct consciousness of any "mental" processes
such as "intentions" or "volitions" occurring within us, but
through our awareness of ourselves as intending the act.
"I know why I did it, and that it was not, for example, like an
involuntary twitch or spasm." (135)
In Part Two, Braine carries this
argument over into human language. As
physical processes involved in perception and action are "internal" to
them, so those involved in speaking and making sounds are "internal"
to talking and thinking in the medium of words.
The most ambitious modern form of materialism, "Artificial
Intelligence," seeks a completely mechanistic accounts of human thought and
language. But it does so only by
ignoring mathematically proven results as to the impossibility of formalizing
natural language or even elementary modes of proof available in natural
arithmetic--ignoring Tarski and Gödel as well as a multitude of philosophers
from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. The
unformalizability of natural language, as well as the relation of langue
and parole implied by it, rule out any completely reductionist account of
speaking and thinking in terms of digitized brain-processes. (461)
This irreducibility, in turn, leads
Braine to an account of human transcendence that is essentially sympathetic to
Aristotelian and Thomist positions. Some
activities of the human being in which its existing or esse may wholly or
partly consist--such as thinking in the medium of words--are not operations of
any bodily organ. It therefore
follows that the human being has an esse which transcends the body and
does not necessarily cease at death. "When
one has died, one is not a nothing but one has no body: we could say that one is
a soul, but this would not be a statement of what one is as if a soul were a
sort of thing." (540) A person
without a body is incomplete--not as an otherwise complete soul lacking a body
to inhabit, but as an animating spirit lacking any subsidiary bodily operations
to integrate into one's own life. It
is as if, instead of the conventional dualist picture of the soul inhabiting a
body, the body is meant to inhabit the soul.
A fascinating and rewarding study.
Highly recommended.
Philip
Blosser
Lenoir-Rhyne
College
Hickory,
North Carolina
Copyright © 1995 The Thomist Press. All rights reserved.
Revised: December 20, 2002