With his characteristic blend of wit and deceptive simplicity, G.K. Chesterton once defined philosophy as ‘thought that has been thought out’. He followed up this pithy definition with an account of why philosophy, so defined, is indispensable: ‘It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today’ (‘The Revival of Philosophy – Why?’ in The Common Man, London and New York, 1950, p. 176).
Chesterton would surely approve of the ambitious project undertaken by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson in Absence of Mind. Based on the Terry Lectures given by Robinson at Yale University in 2009, Absence of Mind inveighs against a fashionable species of bad philosophy – of ‘thought that has not been thought out’– seen by many as inseparable from the cause of ‘culture and enlightenment’. Robinson's target, however, is not so much a system of philosophy as it is a literary genre embodying a philosophical outlook hostile to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. ‘Parascientific literature’– the name Robinson gives to the genre in question – refers to a kind of popular polemical writing in which a radically reductionist picture of human nature is defended by invoking the authority of modern science. These days, of course, there is no shortage of writers working in this genre; and the most successful of them –‘New Atheists’ Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, as well as Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and Antonio Damasio – have won fame well beyond the walls of the academy. Now whatever we may think of these self-styled iconoclasts – and Robinson herself thinks very little of them – there are two things that we absolutely must not say: first, that they have invented the genre in which they are working; second, that what they have to tell us is fundamentally new. As Robinson points out, parascientific literature has been around since the mid-nineteenth century; and the most influential of its early practitioners – Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Sigmund Freud – defined its essential, modernist message once and for all. And just what is that message? Simple, says Robinson: we are given to understand that ‘the Western understanding of what a human being is has been fundamentally in error’ (p. xiii). Far from being a creature made a little lower than the angels, or a soul intuitively attuned to truth, beauty, and goodness, each of us is nothing more than a poor, bare, forked animal whose self-understanding is inherently untrustworthy, even delusional. Love and compassion, remorse and forgiveness, terror and pity, inspiration and grace: none of our intensely significant experiences are what they seem from the first-person perspective; and all of them can be explained away with the aid of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. Since science has now shown that everything which Western civilization has traditionally regarded as ‘higher’ is in truth a mere mask of something ‘lower’, it follows that our religion, our morality, and our art can no longer be taken at face value. Such things can be seen rightly only when viewed from a detached or external perspective; and when we look at human beings from this objective point of view – rather in the way a clinician coolly scrutinizes a hypochondriac – we discover that there is much less to human experience than meets the eye (or mind) of the credulous non-scientist.
This, then, is how Robinson understands the popular philosophy at which her polemical shafts are aimed. Here are four of her main objections to it: (1) Parascientific literature claims to speak with the authority of science, and yet the intellectual virtues for which science is renowned are conspicuously absent from parascientific tracts. For when we open bestsellers belonging to this burgeoning genre, what do we find? Instead of curiosity, complacency; instead of wonder, glacial knowingness; instead of the bread of evidence, the stones of anecdote; and instead of theory answering frankly to fact, fact tortured and forced to serve theory. (2) Parascientific discourse is apt to present itself as wholly disinterested and objective: that is, as uncoloured by culture, unconditioned by history, and uncontaminated by the subjectivity of its practitioners. However, a closer acquaintance with the classics of this genre – Freud's works, for example – indicates that this is far from true. (3) Parascientific arguments are typically based on the science of the moment. However, any philosopher who builds on this foundation may well be building his house on sand, because the history of science teaches us that no theory ever loses its hypothetical character. Science progresses, forever criticizing and completing and correcting itself, and today's fresh fact often becomes tomorrow's stale fiction. (4) Parascientific discourse has the deck stacked against religion from the very beginning. How? Through epistemological legerdemain. Once we have granted that nothing counts as evidence except what is accessible to scientific observation – in other words, once the voice of subjectivity has been silenced and excluded – it is not terribly difficult to depict “religion” as a vestige of a pre-scientific worldview, akin to magic and superstition.
Despite a certain amount of repetition (excusable, perhaps, in a lecture series) and occasional longueurs, Absence of Mind is an admirable work: lucid, forceful, and refreshingly impatient with fashionable cant. Like Robinson's novel Gilead (2004) and her nonfiction work The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), this slender volume – a thoughtful critique of ‘thought that has not been thought out’– is simultaneously a celebration of the mysterious gift of mind and a demonstration of that gift's nuanced powers.
