In his essay on the work of the theologian
Raymond de Sebond that his father asked him to elucidate, Michel de Montaigne
raises a many-sided question typical of his skeptic’s Pyrrhonism: "Est-ce que
je regarde ma chatte ou est-ce que ma chatte me regarde?"  Neither
Clarke nor any of the half-dozen important "panpsychists"  considers
this "catbird seat" issue.  For example, I once learned in the
informative Tuesday "Science Times" section that lobsters have a
sense of chemical smell two-million times ours.  Would this make the
lobster-philosopher wonder whether to deign to include a species so lowly as
the human being within the panpsychic realm of worthiness?  Or would a
common-sense standard that Clarke seems to accept put "humans" in the
"lobster-eye" equivalent of the limbo tennis balls, glass bottles,
and rocks sensibly would belong in?

 Clarke outlines the development of a view of
the "animate" and "inanimate" world probably jarring to our
deepest egocentric and ethnocentric prejudices as "human" beings.  As
the words in which he couches his argument may seem strange, I state the issue
of "panpsychism" as that of the degree to which species and material
entities other than ourselves share an ontological status to even a minimal
degree like ours re independent "mentality" and control.  This
immediately raises the core methodological question of panpsychism, the
"analogical inference" (p. 8).  Oversimplifying, it boils down to two
issues:  the little known issue of "intersubjectivity" given to us,
for example, by the sociologist Max Weber, via Wilhelm Dilthey, as verstehen–simply,
"We can rationally project ourselves into others’ motives based on similar
social action we engage in" and the statistical comparison of two
populations that any undergraduate understands.  In this case we are saying
that there are two populations of animate or inanimate "objects" that
show characteristics A, B, C; if one also shows characteristic "X,"
then we opine the other likely will too. 

He runs through the views of Aristotle, Leibniz,
Descartes, as well as those of such moderns as Whitehead, Nagel, and Chalmers
in such a way, leaving dead or wounded arguments behind, as to give the
impression of the impending crescendo his own will be.  En route he raises the
important Origination Argument against the idea that at some point in
"evolution" a transition occurred (p. 102) from a state "in
which bodies existed with only physical attributes to one in which there were
bodies with perspectives and the capacity for experiencing," a view his
€œhumanists€ though not mechanists would hold.

He concludes with a strange
"definition" of theism (p. 129)–"the view that mentality can be
attributed to the universe as a whole of which all individual natural bodies
are a part"–which he appears to reject in his own so-called
"atheism" (still remarkably theurgic in flavor) only to tell us there
is an independent "religious" attitude key to, if not identical with,
his view of panpsychism.  That "attitude" (p. 145), which by fiat he
imposes on all of the 16,000 societies that have ever existed on this planet,
"regards mentality as eternal and places a priority on a sense of the
eternal in the way we conduct oursleves."

Clarke fashions a relatively dense, varied, and
informative argument within the reach of the careful general reader.  Although
he speaks around terms like "psyche" and "mentality," a
glossary with tightly defined terms would have helped, especially since my
etymological study shows "soul" to be a bit beyond psyche€™s  sense of
"breathing" while "mind" comes down to "memory,"
to me a bodily function.  (On the other hand I appreciated seeing an
intelligible definition [p. 130] of "universe.")  Additionally he
moves from argument to rejected argument in a way that to me fails clearly to
point to his ultimate destination.  I also felt indirectly embarrassed by a
"Latinic" Occam’s Razor, Keep-It-Simple-Stupid, sentence (p. 119) that
tries to make a neuter gerundive agree with a femininely modified noun followed
by another feminine noun given a neuter ending.

Clarke gives us a lot to think about amidst a
rich network of conceptual distinctions.  In the end, however, I could not shake
a simple reaction on threading myself back out of his Minotaur’s labyrinth: 
"So what?"  Any student of  Cultural Anthropology I would recognize
the hylozoic panpsychism in the "mana"/"manitou" beliefs
typical of primitives.  That student would also know that anthropologists have
fought hard to keep the "human" robe from the shoulders of
"lower" animals until Goodall’s tool-making/-carrying and
tool-use-teaching chimpanzees forced a tightening of the definition of what we
"are."  The more broadly we define "human" the greater the
range of beings the killing of "whom" becomes "murder." 
What a wonderful issue for a philosopher’s class in "ethics" that I
used to define to my sociology students as the "philosophy of social
problems"!  There’s more than just "sacred cowism" in the
immensely suggestive answer (p. 96) Clarke gives his own question as to how
"we justify attributing mentality to creatures" we don’t interact
with:  by extending "the attitudes of care and concern that underlie
social cooperation with our fellow humans to other natural forms."

©
2004 A.P. Bober

A. P. Bober
has studied a psychology spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based
on existential phenomenology and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet
philosophic European-based sociology including the "critical" view. 
His teaching augmented courses in group theory/"small-group developmental
dynamics" (lab) while introducing "sociology of knowledge" and
"issues in biological anthropology," with publications in the first
two fields.  Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as
metaphorically tied to neurophysiology.

Categories: Psychology, Religion