Götzen-Dämmerung: Notes on Wandering Wombs, Spontaneous Generation, Bodily Humours and the Ancient Greek Soul

Sounding out idols of the mind since 1888 

 

I. 

 

It's easy (and thus tempting) to look back on humanity's past and smile at some of the odd things that people - including philosophers and men of learning - used to believe. 

 

I've already written, for example, about the theory of maternal impression - click here and here - but thought it might be interesting to briefly mention three other ancient truths that we now know to be false [1] ...

(i) The Wandering Womb

Belief in the wandering womb (as a cause of hysteria) can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks, though it persisted as a popular idea in European medicine well into the medieval and early-modern period. 

 

For celebrated physicians like Aretaeus of Cappadocia, writing in the 2nd century AD, the uterus was a free-floating organ which resembled an autonomous creature happily living within the female body, sensitive to smells and always in search of fluids to sustain it. 

 

It wasn't until our knowledge of anatomy improved from the 16th-century onwards that this idea of a wandering womb began to slowly lose credibility and female hysteria would eventually become a condition associated with the mind, rather than the uterus [2].      

 

(ii) Spontaneous Generation 

 

The theory of spontaneous generation held that living creatures (such as fleas and maggots) could arise from non-living matter (such as dust and decomposing flesh) and that such processes were all part of the natural order [3]. 

 

Again, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for this amusing idea. 

 

For it was Aristotle who synthesised earlier explanations provided by the natural philosophers [φυσιολόγοι] for the mysterious appearance of organisms, into a coherent theory which would be taken as a matter of scientific fact for the next 2000 years (it wasn't until spontaneous generation was disproved by Louis Pasteur and others in the 1850s, that the term fell out of favour within scientific circles).  

 

 

(iii) Bodily Humours 

 

Even the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, subscribed to a few mistaken notions, central amongst which was the idea that vital bodily fluids (or humours) determined human health and disposition. 

 

Again, this theory persisted well into the modern era as doctors down the centuries vainly attempted to balance blood, phlegm, and two types of bile (black and yellow), in the belief that any excess or deficiency of any one of these four humours would result in illness or a bad character. 

 

It wasn't until the advent of germ theory, which demonstrated that many diseases previously thought to be humoral were in fact caused by pathogens, that physicians were able to move on (though such ideas persist in those parts of the world that still practice traditional medicine).  

 

II.

 

The point I'm trying to make here is twofold:

 

Firstly, I'm trying to illustrate how even the best minds can get things wrong and how certain ideas can become so ingrained within our thinking over such long periods of time, that they become unquestioned articles of faith and common belief (doxa). 

 

Secondly, I'm trying to encourage readers not to simply look back and laugh at the mistaken ideas of antiquity, but ask themselves what cherished beliefs they might subscribe to as truths which will one day be exposed as fallacious and fantastical ...

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the still widespread belief in the psyche - a concept often used by people who think mind is something separate from (and other to) brain activity, but who still wish to sound rational rather than religious and so try to avoid words like soul or spirit. 

 

Like all of the ideas examined above, this one can be traced back to the ancient Greeks; ψυχή is central to the philosophy of Plato, and Aristotle wrote a hugely influential work on the subject. Indeed, the latter's theory of the three souls - vegetal, animal, and human - would dominate the field of psychology until the 19th century.

 

I'm reminded at this point of Nietzsche's realisation that one day we will have to overcome the last trace of Greek influence on our thinking - as beautiful and as profound as it may have once seemed - and take a hammer to all the old idols of the mind [4] ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The big one, of course, would be God, but I can't imagine anyone reading TTA needs reminding of the circumstances surrounding his death.  

 

[2] Today, of course, hysteria is no longer a clinically recognised condition and no one thinks the womb a thirsty roaming animal.  

[3] The imaginary process by which life was believed to routinely and rapidly emerge from non-living matter (such as the seasonal generation of mice and other animals from the mud of the Nile), is sometimes referred to as abiogenesis. It should be noted, however, that spontaneous generation has no operative principles in common with the modern hypothesis of abiogenesis used within evolutionary biology, which argues that life arose from simple organic compounds over a time span of many millions of years.

 

[4] It might be argued that the analytic philosopher Paul Churchland has pushed philosophising with a hammer to its extreme in his eliminative materialism, which, as Nietzsche might have said, is radikal bis zum Verbrechen. 

      Churchland is convinced that neuroscience will eventually spell the end for psychology, which he thinks a fundamentally defective and confused theory. The problem, however, is whilst with hindsight we can see the inadequacies and absurdities of ancient theories, it's not so easy to see these within contemporary theories that remain part of our Lebenswelt and which the majority of people still believe to be not merely true, but blindingly obvious to anyone with common sense. 

      Readers interested in Churchland's work might like to see his crucial essay 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes', in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Feb 1981), pp. 67-90. I refer to this essay in a previous (and related) post to this one: click here. 

 

 

Aphantasia: On Eliminating the Imagination

Aphantasia (oil and clay) 

by Rachel L. Clarke

artphantasia.com

 

 

I. 

 

According to some, imagination is the foundation of material reality. That is to say, nothing actually exists before it has first been seen in the mind's eye. Such people have no evidence for this and so either quote poets or Plato for support, or fall back on good old common sense [1]. 

 

Isn't it obvious, they ask, that dreams, desires, and imaginative ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things and precede substantial forms. Think about it, they say, man like God creates by first imagining things and then willing them into physical existence.  

 

Well, I have thought about it and this mixture of idealism and folk psychology seems to me nonsense. I agree with D. H. Lawrence here; no mind - not even Jordan Peterson's - could have imagined a lobster "dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!" [2] 

 

Ultimately, I would suggest, we can only imagine things that already exist and that it is not the imagination that determines reality, but reality that shapes the imagination. To quote Lawrence once more: 

 

"Even the mind of God can only imagine 

those things that have become themselves: 

bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation 

even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe." [3]

 

  

II.

In an essay on eliminative materialism, Paul Churchland argues that "our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience" [4].

 

One of the problems with folk psychology is that when evaluated with regard to its coherence and continuity in relation to more recent work in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, it soon becomes increasingly suspect and would, argues Churchland, evoke open skepticism were it not one of our oldest and most cherished theories.

 

The fact is, that even the faculty of creative imagination, for example, is something that remains almost wholly mysterious within the framework provided by folk psychology. The latter believes its truths to not only be self-evident, but universally and eternally true and so is little prone to self-criticism or to change; perfect theories have no need to evolve in the light of new evidence or knowledge. 

 

Ultimately, folk psychology has become a form of faith or dogma, proud of its own conceptual inertia. At best, says Churchland, it provides a "partial and unpenetrating gloss on a deeper and more complex reality" [5] - one that is wholly material (rather than imaginary) in nature and not cluttered up with a lot of second-hand representations and hoary old archetypes [6].

 

         

Notes

 

[1] There's a very good reason why those who belong to a post-Romantic literary and/or post-Kantian philosophical tradition often return to a conceptual framework for mental phenomena based upon a remarkably conservative theory of common sense (or as they sometimes call it intuitive wisdom). For as Paul Churchland points out, it very conveniently provides "a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind, including the explanation and prediction of behavior, the semantics of mental predicates, action theory, the other-minds problem, the intentionality of mental states, the nature of introspection, and the mind-body problem". 

      Unfortunately, explanatory and predictive success does not necessarily make a theory true and those who subscribe to folk psychology might at least consider the possibility that its principles are radically false and its ontology is an illusion.

      See Churchland's essay 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes', in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 2, (Feb 1981), pp. 67-90. Lines quoted are on p. 68. I will return to this essay in part two of this post.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603. 

      Lawrence's opposition to the imagination as the ability to make pictures of the world and oneself in the mind without any external sensory input, is revealed in his review of The Social Basis of Consciousness (1927) by Trigant Burrow. Lawrence argues, for example, that mental images are a substitute for life. As soon as man falls into self-consciousness, he makes pictures of himself - that is to say, he imagines himself ideally - and then he tries to live according to the picture. The imagination is thus a form of imprisonment; we become trapped within a world of representation. If only, he says, we could understand and admit to ourselves that we and the world are not the same as the images we make, then we might be able to live and think and create in an entirely fresh (non-ideal) manner. Ultimately, says Lawrence, the imagination is not real: "It is a horrible compulsion set over us [...] The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird as it sings sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself." Those who call themselves psychoanalysts, if they really cared about their patients, would liberate them from their own imaginations and get them back into touch with the world as it exists outside them (i.e. mind-independently): they must shatter the great image-producing machine that reflects nothing but their own human conceit. 

      See 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in D. H. Lawrence, Introductiond and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp, 329-336. Lines quoted are on pp. 334 and 336.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., op. cit., p. 603. 

 

[4] Paul Churchland,  'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes' ... op. cit., p. 67.

[5] Ibid., p. 74.

[6] Even some philosophers in the European tradition eventually grew tired of post-Kantian models of the imagination; Gilles Deleuze, for example, refused to think of it as something innate or natural, but, rather, something that has been constructed and authorised by the governing determinations of the good, the true, and the beautiful. 

 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about aphantasia - the inability to create mental images in one's mind - should visit the Aphantasia Network: click here. 

Haemostasis

For Lawrence, who subscribes to a libidinal materialism in which 'touch' is of crucial importance, the physical handling of an object brings us much closer to a true understanding of it than any abstract theory of the thing. Via frequent contact and usage, we gain what he terms 'blood-knowledge' and by which he means an intuitive, sensual, and pre-cognitive way of relating to the material world.

Although he often claims that he is not an opponent of mind and doesn't advocate an acephalic humanity, Lawrence clearly privileges some form of primal consciousness that he locates in the lower-body and which delights in doing the washing-up. One of the reasons he dislikes Kant is because the latter only thought coldly and critically with his head and never darkly and desirously with his blood: and he never did the dishes!

Real thought, says Lawrence, is an experience and requires the establishment of a 'peculiar alien sympathy' with the otherness of things that lie external to our selves and exist mind-independently. Idealism marks the death of all this: it is a negation of the real and of the great affective centres within the body wherein the pristine unconscious is located. If we are to be happy and vital creatures, then we must, says Lawrence, get back into vivid relationship with the cosmos; i.e. get back into touch and know once more not in terms of apartness (which is rational and scientific), but in terms of togetherness (which is religious and poetic).

What are we to make of all this? At one time, I would have subscribed to this vision and affirmed Lawrence's libidinal materialism without hesitation. And, in fact, I still think there is much to be said for the latter and believe it may hold a fundamental key to the development of an object-oriented ontology. Ultimately, Lawrence plays for me much the same role that Heidegger plays for Graham Harman and he remains a major influence on my thinking.

However, I now have some reservations and find much of what Lawrence writes here, as elsewhere, problematic. Thus, the idea that the physical handling of a mundane object such as a tea-pot, or the frequent use of a tool such as a hammer, somehow brings us closer to it than we might ever be to those things of which we have only a theoretical understanding - such as molecules, black holes, or electromagnetic waves - seems dubious.

In fact, it seems to be based on an entirely false (although common) distinction made between theoretical and non-theoretical forms of knowledge, in which the former are presented as artificial, speculative, and parasitic upon the latter which is the warm-blooded body of true human  understanding. As Paul Churchland points out: "That these specious contrasts are wholesale nonsense has not prevented them finding expression and approval" in the writings not only of artists and poets like Lawrence, but also in the work of many philosophers. Churchland continues:

"Upon close inspection the various contrasts thought to fund the distinction are seen to disappear. If viewed warily, the network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our common-sense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial  as any overtly theoretical system. ... Comprehensive theories, on the other hand, prove not to be essentially parasitic, but to be potentially autonomous frameworks in their own right. In short, it appears that all knowledge ... is theoretical; that there is no such thing as non-theoretical understanding. Our common-sense conceptual framework stands unmasked as being itself a theory, or a battery of theories. And where before we saw a dichotomy between the theoretical and non-theoretical, we are left with little more than a distinction between freshly minted theory and thoroughly thumb-worn theory whose cultural assimilation is complete."

- Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (CUP, 1979), pp. 1-2.

In other words, Lawrence's blood-knowledge is simply another term for doxa - or that which can be passed off as true without question simply because it has already been widely accepted as such in advance. Thus Lawrence, the arch-opponent of the cliche and stereotype, is here exposed as trading in such; just as he panders to prejudice and reinforces reactionary ignorance with his lazy and disappointing dismissal of modern science.