Our Modern Split Personality Disorder
Modern man suffers from a particularly strange kind of split personality disorder: he believes simultaneously that he both does and doesn’t exist.
Obviously, in one sense, there is nothing I could be more certain of than that what I am experiencing right now is real. I have a stonking sore throat. There’s spilled coffee trickling down my leg. The bridge from “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Frankie Valli is looping around in my head. It’s all so obviously real—and even more obviously, me.
Although if science is to be believed, it isn’t—not really. According to an increasingly mainstream interpretation of things, only the most rudimentary physical features of the universe—particles, fields, forces—count as genuinely real. Everything else, including people, can be metaphysically simmered down to these few basic building blocks, with extraneous, wafty notions like emotions or morals or the self evaporated off entirely.
If that sounds like a straw man, take it from Biologist Francis Crick. He writes: “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free-will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve-cells and their attendant molecules.” For those like Crick, the whole vivid, pungent, maddening world we experience day to day—bursting with colors and smells and music and morals—is really no more than one big illusion.
Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913–14
Not everyone goes as far as Crick, of course (though plenty do). But even those of us wary of his reductionism still feel unsure about how, exactly, we fit into the scientific picture of things. Our physics textbooks say nothing of love and shame and beauty and hope. These human phenomena exist, as it were, on a separate acetate sheet, which we try to lay on top of (and somehow make align with), the neat diagrammatic outlines of the physical world. The two roughly line up, but there seems to be no way of transferring the markings from one onto the other. They remain entirely separate domains. And so we end up forced to adopt a kind of schizophrenic conception of reality, experiencing the world around us in two conflicting and seemingly mutually exclusive modes at once.
This might be no problem if we could genuinely treat the two as irreconcilable but equally real visions of the world. But science is much too proud for that. It wants complete power—and its ongoing war with ordinary human experience is slowly driving us mad.
An Argentinian in Paris
In 1938, a promising young physicist from Argentina named Ernesto Sabato was awarded a fellowship at the Curie Institute in Paris, one of the highest prizes in his field. But within weeks of arriving in France, he quickly found himself drawn to quite a different aspect of Parisian cultural life: surrealism. When he wasn’t working on atomic radiation, he spent his time in Montmartre painting with the Spanish artist Óscar Dominguez, the two of them passing back and forth bottles of turpentine and cognac. He spent time in Les Deux Magots with Wifredo Lam and Tristan Tzara, creating “exquisite corpses”—absurd pictures produced collectively by each participant sketching an unfinished image, folding the paper over, and passing the sheet on. Oscillating between “logarithms and sinusoids” and “the faces of men,” the physicist soon gave up on science altogether, committing full time to becoming a painter and writer.
So goes the “origin story” of Sabato, later considered, along with his rival and friend Jorge Luis Borges, one of Argentina’s great novelists. Much of Sabato’s post-war writing deals with the inherent tension between science and ordinary human experience. In his 1951 essay “Hombres y engranajes” (“Men and Gears”), he recalls his own journey away from the “dehumanizing” strictures of the scientific life:
“It still makes me laugh with self-disgust when I remember myself among electrometers, still supporting the spiritual narrowness and the vanity of those scientists, vanity that much more contemptible because it always dressed in phrases about Humanity, Progress and other abstract stylistic fetishes; while the war approached, in which that Science, which according to those gentlemen had come to liberate humans from all their physical and metaphysical maladies, would be the instrument of mechanised slaughter. There, in 1938, I knew that my fleeting pass through science had ended. How I then understood the moral value of surrealism, its destructive force against the myths of an exhausted civilization, its purifying power.”
Sabato then places his own crisis within a broader history—and critique—of Western rationality. He begins in the Middle Ages, when the emergence of merchant capitalism and the mapping of trade routes after the Crusades ushered in an age of cartography, mechanical clocks, and double-entry bookkeeping. Painters discovered perspective and adorned their works, as Leonardo wrote, “with the flowers of mathematics.” Soon, Galileo declared all of reality to be written in the language of numbers, and Descartes remodeled human knowledge on the step-by-step deductions of geometers.
Fernand Léger, Les Disques (The disks), 1918
This “fetishism” for quantification spread everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not least into the domain of the human. In science’s hands, Sabato writes, “the world of the trees, the beasts and the flowers, men and their passions” became “a mix comprised of sinusoids, logarithms, Greek letters, triangles, and probability waves. And, what is worse: nothing more than that.” Humanity became mechanized, reality made synonymous with physics, reason made identical with maths.
At various points throughout this history—in the proto-Protestantism of Savonarola, the art of Michelangelo, the mysticism of Pascal, the existentialism of Kierkegaard—the human spirit tried to rebel. But because science co-opted rationality, the rebellion took an increasingly irrational, inward-looking, even nihilistic, form. The “objective” nineteenth-century novels of Dickens and Zola gave way to the subjectivism of Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. Painters turned to primitivism and then surrealism. Sabato recognized in his own life as a schizophrenic vacillation from excessive rationality to excessive unreason. An ever-present binary in Western culture—between Apollo and Dionysius, between Athens and Jerusalem, between Classicism and Romanticism—became a fatal rupture, and the destructive political forces of the twentieth century unleashed both extremes at once.
At the end of the essay, Sabato calls for the reintegration of science and human experience—a “vast synthesis of contrary elements.” And in passing, he cites something he refers to as “existential-phenomenological philosophy” as one possible solution.
Husserl’s Answer
Edmund Husserl, the father of this “existential-phenomenological philosophy,” never had a chance to read Sabato’s essay. He died in 1938—the year Sabato found surrealism. But he would have perfectly recognized the problem Sabato was describing, and had spent the last few years of his life trying to solve it in his final, unfinished, book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
Like Sabato, Husserl thought the battle between science and ordinary human experience was, in reality, a one-way assault. Ordinary human experience is quite happy to coexist with science, but science wants to destroy ordinary experience. Husserl’s initial approach, therefore, was to cut science down to size: to show that it cannot meaningfully exist by itself.
Husserl argues that science, in becoming too narrow, has undermined itself by leaving no room for human reason. The story goes something like this: Starting with Galileo, philosophy began to dispel from its picture of reality all non-mathematically-describable features of the world. Starting with Descartes, philosophy began to dispel from its method any non-mathematically-describable forms of reasoning. These restrictions proved to be remarkably efficacious. But taken to their logical conclusion, they produce all manner of contradictions.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808–10
First, if the only things we can include in our picture of reality are those describable in terms of quantity—mass, extension, velocity, and so on—then it’s hard to see how we end up with anything other than physicalism. And if only the physical aspects of the universe are really real, then human reason, which is demonstrably not reducible to quarks or magnetic fields or anything else measurable, is called into question. If human reason comes into question, then science, which is itself a product of human reason, must be called into question, too. In seeking to give a full explanation of reality in purely physical terms, science undermines its own legitimacy, rendering itself unable to say anything at all.
Second, if we model philosophical knowledge exclusively on math—if the only arguments we accept are those that can be logically deduced from one another—then we turn rationality into a self-contained loop that ultimately lacks any means of justifying itself. No mathematical justification can be given for using math. No logical justification can be given for using logic. Something else is needed to justify any decision to use them—and to verify their correctness—from without. Husserl argues that this “something else” is ordinary, irreducible human reason.
Indeed, science as a discipline depends almost entirely on decisions we make “outside of” science in ordinary, everyday life. Matter does not, on its own, spontaneously decide to form into a microscope and then study, by itself, the structure of a skin cell. And we can reverse the equation. How could there be science if it weren’t the science of something? An explanation needs something to explain; a summary needs something to summarize. It should be obvious, Husserl argues, that science is simply one restricted method of looking at something much larger and fundamental: the ordinary world we experience around us every day—what he called the Lebenswelt, or “lived world.” That we have forgotten this only shows how intoxicating the Galilean–Cartesian worldview has become.
As it happens, many scientists of Husserl’s time agreed. The theoretical physicist Hermann Weyl condemned the “ridiculous circle” of science about science—a circle we can escape “only if we accept the manner in which we understand in daily life man and things … as an irreducible fundament.” The mathematician David Hilbert conceded the impossibility of explaining thinking as a part of a purely physical model of reality. Thinking, as something qualitative, would count in this picture only as “merely apparent—an absurd consequence for a view of nature which arises from the desire to make all content of reality accessible to our thinking.” An exclusively physical picture of reality is thus “fundamentally unattainable.”
In his book Mind and Matter, Erwin Schrödinger argues that “the material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it.” He quotes Jung:
All science however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence.
Schrödinger concludes: “Of course Jung is quite right.”
As the great phenomenologists and theoretical physicists of the mid-twentieth century saw it, science simply cannot deny ordinary human experience without ultimately undermining itself. Somehow, the technical and the everyday must be made to coexist. The question is how.