Over summer, I read Marilynne Robinson’s terrific Absence of Mind. It is a great book and I highly recommend it. With precision and flare, Robinson tears into the “parascientific literature” of today which smugly proclaims that we now finally understand human beings, and guess what — they’re just animals and the whole consciousness, spirit, soul, mind thing is all a bit of a mistake. Here is Robinson:
The schools of thought that support the modernist consensus are profoundly incompatible with one another, so incompatible that they cannot be taken collectively to support one grand conclusion. That they are understood to have done so might reasonably be taken to suggest that this irresistible conclusion came before, perhaps inspired, the arguments that have been and still are made to support it. I propose that the core assumption that remains unchallenged and unquestioned through all the variations within the diverse traditions of ‘modern’ thought is that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away, excluded from consideration when any rational account is to be made of the nature of human being and of being altogether. In its place we have the grand projects of generalization, solemn efforts to tell our species what we are and what we are not, that were early salients of modern thought. Sociology and anthropology are two examples. (p22).
Two particular highlights of the book include Robinson’s pointing out that the concept of a meme in parascientific literature in fact opens the door to the concept of mind beyond genetics, and her suggestion that Freud’s theories must be understood as a culturally-embedded reaction to European anti-semitism.
