Over the past
month, I have been trying to read and understand Thomas Nagel's Mind
and Cosmos. I have been struggling with this book, in part
because it is highly abstract philosophy (and I find extreme
abstraction almost impossible to understand) but also in part because
it seems to keep stating the same idea over and over in slightly
different terminologies. So, I was very happy to see in the New York
Times today a concise overview by Nagel of the book's
argument1—on
the very day the book is due, with no more renewals allowed!
What Nagel is
calling for, as I understand it, is a new paradigm of reality. We
have materialism, which reduces all existence to matter in order to
understand it, “subtracting from the physical world as an object
of study everything mental—consciousness, meaning, intention, or
purpose.” And we have theism, “the polar opposite of
materialism,” which “makes physical law a consequence of
mind. . . . theism interprets intelligibility ultimately in terms of
intention or purpose.”2
And we have a battle of philosophies on our hands, waged primarily
in the political arena.
Nagel does not
present the new paradigm, only argues that it is necessary: “Mind,
I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous
gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until
we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific
orthodoxy.” I believe this is a very important first step--for
us humans to move from an either/or understanding of reality to a
both/and understanding. I have no idea how this new paradigm will
develop, but I do think that metaphorical thinking will have a place
in it. In metaphor, after all, the abstract idea is from the realm
of mental reality and the concrete image from the realm of material
reality. Metaphor joins mind and matter together. We need to learn
how to apply this both/and thinking to our understanding of the world
we live in, both social and natural.
Kudos to Nagel for
delivering the call for this new paradigm!
All quotes will be from this essay unless
otherwise noted.
2The quotes on
theism are from the book: Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (NY:
Oxford UP, 2012), pg 21.
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