[Reflections on two talks on Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein at McGill
1. Subjectivity is not really making a comeback in cognitive sciencei, at least not as a form of empirical data or as a part of theory, or as a way of generating or testing theory.
2. Nor is language the window on the mind, or on the mind/body problem or the other-minds problem.
3. Subjectivity just means that we feel: We have subjective states. The rest is just about the contents of those subjective states — anything from ouch to cogito ergo sum.
4. So it’s equally certain (within the limits of the other-minds problem, which applies as much to other talking people as to behaving rats) that other people as well as other rats feel. And we have ways of inferring it, reliably, in both cases; and that’s fine for psychophysics and psychophysiology (but it certainly does not solve the mind/body problem).
5. Certainty about the fact that subjectivity exists has never been the problem. The (mind/body) problem is: explaining how and why subjectivity exists: how and why matter feels, how and why some functional states are felt states, rather than just “functed” states.
6. That is the problem that Spinoza (and others, including me) think, for various reasons, is unsolvable. So, so much for Spinoza’s conviction that at the end of the day all questions will be answered, or answerable! He has already refuted that conviction with his conviction that the two “aspects” have no unified explanation.
7. Still, it’s a good rule of thumb for intellectual inquiry — perhaps the only viable rule of thumb — that every question has an answer.
8. About your moral indignation if your fellow-picnickers knowingly let you bite into a wasp without warning you: That’s valid (though not quite universal, because it is not clear whether autists and psychopaths would share your indignation, even if they were in the same situation).
9. But either way, it’s not a viable basis for objective ethics (for deriving “ought” from “is”). All it means is that, as biological creatures, we have a (mostly) shared adaptive “mind-reading” ability and propensity (“mirror neurons”) and needs and expectations. So far that says absolutely nothing about “is” or “ought,” but only about survival value and adaptive advantages — i.e., about “can” and “does”.
10. The fact that it feels like something to be morally indignant that someone does not do what you feel he ought to do simply adds — to the “can” and the “does” — the insoluble problem already mentioned: the very fact that we feel (the mind/body problem).
11. There would of course be no ethics if there were no feeling (and hence no feelings to hurt). But that doesn’t help. It just means that feeling is a necessary condition for ethics; but it doesn’t make ethics objective. On the contrary, it highlights its subjectivity. (And then there are also the autists and psychopapths and non-telepathic or apathetic animals, who feel otherwise, or feel nothing at all on the matter of the feelings of others.)
12. There’s no question that Spinoza has a large following today. (Whether it is a substantive intellectual revival or just another cult — like Peirce and Dewey and Gibson, or even vulgar Darwinism — is another matter!)
13. But I don’t think it counts as evidence that the Spinoza revival is a substantive intellectual one to cite the fondness of Einstein for Spinoza! What made Einstein an immortal intellectual giant was not the quality of mentation that went into his thoughts about Spinoza. If his intellectual weight depended on the quality of his mentation (or verse) about Spinoza, Einstein would be an exceedingly minor thinker.
14. Nor does the fact that both Einstein and Spinoza were guided by a faith in the answerability of all questions give that affinity more substance. That motivation is a prerequisite for many kinds of intellectual quest. If you think of it, pessimistically, as a losing game — whether zero-sum or non-zero-sum — it’s like going hunting convinced you have no quarry. (That’s as much of an evolutionary non-starter as Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself…”)
15. Damasio’s affinity for Spinoza does not make the revival substantive either. Damasio focusses on emotion in brain function, but he never explains how and why the brain feels rather than just functs: He does not even realize the problem!
16. In general, the fact that the findings of contemporary “cognitive science” square with seventeenth-century Spinoza does not necessarily attest to the fact that Spinoza was advanced: it could alas just as well mean that cogsci is retarded…
17. And last: What on earth does “God is Nature” mean? Does every imaginary entity become real if we simply declare it identical with some other entity that really does exist?
18. Does Charlie Brown’s “Great Pumpkin” become real if I simply aver that He is in reality just the Secret of French Cooking?
19. Is polytheism vindicated if I say that each deity is in reality a hadron (or each hadron is in reality a deity)?
20. And are the armchair consolations of philosophical understanding invoked by Spinoza really a nontrivial balm for Auschwitz inmates? (If not, then what more does it mean than that minor malaise can sometimes be minimized by mentation — just as it can by medication?)