"The nature of mind has been an enigma since
the beginning of recorded history. In many ways it is as much a mystery today
as it was to the ancient Greeks." So begins David Skrbina’s excellent
comprehensive chronicle of the ubiquitous presence of panpsychism in the
history of Western philosophy of mind.

Most of us have some idea of what
panpsychism means but the term has been and still is defined variously and
often ambiguously, and has numerous confusing near-synonyms (pp. 15-22).^[1]
One author sees it as "any view that reunites mentality with
materiality, and thereby dismantles the foundational dualism of Western
thought".^[2] For
Skrbina, a philosophy professor, panpsychism is, roughly, the position that
"all things have mind or a mind-like quality….mind would exist, in some
form, in all things…." (p. 2). He points out that panpsychists do not
like to say that everything is "conscious," because that is a
formulation that too easily is ridiculed; he wants to "avoid the most
heavily anthropocentric terms." Rather, "the panpsychist asks us to
see the ‘mentality’ of other objects not in terms of human consciousness
but as a subject of a certain universal quality of physical things, in
which both inanimate mentality and human consciousness are taken as particular
manifestations" (p. 17). Skrbina’s proposed functional definition is:
"All objects, or system of objects, possess a singular inner experience of
the world around them" (p. 16). Furthermore, as Skrbina uses it,
panpsychism refers to 

a meta-theory of mind. It is a statement
about theories of mind, not a theory in itself. It only claims that all things
(however defined) possess some mind-like quality; it says nothing, per se,
about the nature of that mind, nor of the specific relationship between mind
and matter. (p. 249)

Panpsychism,
then, has to do with the "enigma of mind"–a subject that these days
is out of favor in most professional fields. While few thinkers now would go as
far as to maintain eliminativistically that there is no such phenomenon as
"mind," still, by far the dominant view in most disciplines and among
the public at large is that in principle we do already know what
"it is." The usual answer, of course, is some version of emergentism,
the doctrine that mind is a phenomenon that (somehow) emerged out of inanimate
matter in the course of the world’s evolution. Never mind that we do not now
know the exact details; mechanistic neuroscience will sooner or later fill in
the missing gaps. We have an apparently reliable promissory note.

This is outright, question-begging
scientism:

Nearly all present-day philosophers of
mind [and nearly all scientists] are emergentists who assume that mind emerged
[out of inanimate matter] at some point in evolution. Usually, however, they do
not address the question of how such emergence is conceivable, and they do not
acknowledge that one needs not assume this…. (p. 7) Mind in humans is
an unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable, mystery to science. Mind that may
exist elsewhere in nature is scientifically unintelligible and methodologically
superfluous. Modern analytic philosophy supports both this view of mind and the
mechanistic worldview generally, and hence sees no credibility in panpsychic
theories….  Emergentism, in all forms,
is … profoundly incomplete at present.^[3]  This fact alone suggests that panpsychist
theories deserve greater attention. (p. 185)

Typically, mainstream science and
mainstream philosophy distort and ridicule panpsychism (see especially pp.
235-236), but the fact is, not only cannot neuroscience (and cognate natural
sciences) explain mind (i.e., awareness, presence, consciousness) "at
present," but no one even has offered any conception of how the
quantitative sciences could explain "scientifically," ever, the
qualitative transition that occurs when physical energy (including
electro-chemical neurological activity in the body) is finally transformed into
subjective experience (in the brain?). Apparently no one has the faintest idea
about how such an explanation might look.^[4]  (But that hasn’t prevented a near-universal
acceptance of the emergentist, mechanistic dogma.)

So, in reality we have a choice of what
amounts to two credos: panpsychism, or else emergentism in one or another form.
Neither belief is incontrovertible, beyond doubt, at least not at this time.
Panpsychism, however, does offer some advantages: "To account for the
human mind/soul, the mechanistic [and/or emergentist] philosopher must resort
to supernatural dualism, epiphenomenalism, or eliminativism" (p. 102)–all
positions that have their own highly problematic aspects. Skrbina argues that
panpsychism offers resolutions to problems that these mainstream schemas find
intractable (and therefore typically evade). That is a major, but not the only,
reason for its importance for philosophy (and potentially, I believe, also for
science). Skrbina lists four more reasons: (1) panpsychism occupies a unique
position in philosophy, (2) it has important moral and axiological implications
(perhaps most especially ecological),^[5]
(3) it "brings into sharp relief the nature of mechanistic
philosophy", and (4) so far Western philosophy has severely underanalyzed
it and has been inappropriately dismissive" (p.4).^[6]

Panpsychism has a unique and very old
history in philosophy and in world views in general, and seems to reflect
"a universal human impulse" (p. 3). Skrbina chronicles the complex
history of the rise and fall of panpsychist worldviews. "The pre-Christian
era acknowledged the presence of spirit and mind in nature. The Christian
worldview took spirit out of nature and placed it largely, but ambiguously,
within the monotheistic figure of God" (p. 58). With the Renaissance
(sixteenth- and seventeenth century Europe) began the rise to dominance of a
mechanistic, clockwork, machine view of the world with uneasy detours through
dualism (especially the Cartesian mind-body dualism) to the current prevalent
pseudo-monist reductionist scientific materialism. The key founding figure here
is René Descartes, whose dualism "set the emerging scientific, mechanistic
worldview on the track that it would follow for the next 400 years and
beyond" (p. 85), but always "there was a persistent countercurrent of
thought that was non-mechanistic" (p. 65).

Chapter 1 is a clear, comprehensive,
intricate, highly detailed, informative and balanced overview that provides the
background for this historical narrative. Most of the remaining chapters
examine "in detail the evolution of panpsychist thought from the time of
the pre-Socratics through the present" (p. 22). Chapters 2 to 9 present a
valuable, instructive, broad, and thorough critical review of Western thought
about mind, conducted from a panpsychist perspective. The chapters
"demonstrate something of the breadth and depth of panpsychist thought
over the past 2,600 years" (p. 250), revisiting and reanalyzing the host
of arguments advanced for and against it over the centuries. The comprehensive
compilation and discussions of a staggering collection of panpsychist
positions, arguments, not only illuminate the subject matter but can serve as
an encyclopedic reference resource.

The chapters cover: ancient origins;
developments in the renaissance; continental panpsychism of the eighteenth
century; panpsychism, mechanism and science in nineteenth-century Germany; the
Anglo-American perspective; panpsychism, 1900-1950; scientific perspectives in
the early and middle twentieth century; and, panpsychism from 1950 to the
present.

The final chapter, "Toward a
Panpsychist Worldview", summarizes and assesses the arguments presented
for and against panpsychism. Skrbina concludes that currently its proponents
and opponents have reached a standoff:

Those who are struck by an intuitive
appreciation of panpsychism will formulate supportive and coherent arguments,
or express their beliefs in poetic or metaphorical language. Those who find it
impossible, unintelligible, and outrageous will offer their objections–without
a whit of concession from the other side. (p. 265)

He
notes that which side of the argument one takes will be a matter of personal
style rather than the result of rational argument. That consideration ought to
be particularly meaningful to psychotherapists, used as they are to seeing the
ubiquitous but all too often misused application of rationality in Western
thought. Specifically, they are thoroughly familiar with the pathological use
often made of rationality (in used defensively via splitting,
compartmentalization, denial, projection, identification, etc.). I am convinced
that philosophy, and science too, could profit greatly from a better
understanding and appreciation of the role that characterological and
"irrationality" (pathological irrationality has its own obscure
rationality) factors play in disciplines.^[7]

There may be a standoff, as Skrbina says,
but on the whole the opponents to panpsychism have won the day: "the
mechanistic worldview is deeply imbedded in our collective psyche" (p.
265). Yet, "several great thinkers were very explicit that they saw panpsychism
as the foundation for a fundamentally new outlook on reality" (p. 267).^[8]
Skrbina suggests that to proponents of panpsychism, the mechanistic,
instrumental worldview which at one time was liberating now "has outlived
its usefulness…. [It] took some 350 years before the negative effects became
apparent" (pp. 265, 268), but reductive mechanism seems to have reached a
terminal stage. Many would see that as an understatement: That worldview has
launched and maintains us on a hugely destructive path. Thus, Skrbina’s final
comment:

We as a civilization need only summon our
collective wisdom and courage, learn the lessons of history, and transcend the
crude, destructive, and ultimately dehumanizing materialist worldview. (p. 269)

Skrbina proposes that panpsychism can
provide the framework for an alternative and salvational world view. Still, he
also proposes to retain quantitative science ("use of concepts from chaos
theory and nonlinear dynamics"–p. 240) within that forward development,
but I am convinced that such an approach cannot lead to a truly liberating
alternative. I have argued elsewhere at length that retaining any
mathematical formalisms as the basis for one’s world framework necessarily
(though perhaps covertly) retains and maintains an anti-panpsychist,
fundamentally mechanistic position.^[9]
My own proposals for countering reductive materialisms go in a quite different
direction.

In sum, Skrbina’s book is a valuable,
readable work. It may have too much historical detail for some general readers
but even these could profit from a selective reading. Its implications go
beyond philosophy and the natural sciences. Its general thrust fits in well
with the growing serious critiques that oppose the inappropriate extensions of
mechanistic, "propositional," rational-technological thinking to
other fields^[10]
including medicine,^[11]
general psychology,^[12]
ecology and ethics,^[13]
or the mental health fields.^[14]
I liked the book very much and recommend it highly to any reader interested in
pondering alternatives to our depersonalizing, dehumanizing, mechanizing,
scientistic, disenchanted and disenchanting worldview and practices.