Unexamined Materialism

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Our mental map or our picture of the world is like the glasses we wear as we look at ourselves and our world. Wittgenstein says a picture can hold us captive. 

We live in a cross-pressured society post Enlightenment. The rebirth of reason with enlightenment of science reframed everything in our western world. What to do with demons and miracles? They must have been mental illness and well timed natural events. The picture we inhabit is one which sees only a natural order, read mechanistic one, the great chain of being of billiard balls and gene mutations.

But now that deconstruction has spread into the wider culture, the reasoners themselves are called into question. This has caused some of us to go about a re-enchantment. The same person who cannot believe in God might accept other spirits and hang talismans from their rearview mirror. 

What I don't think we hold together or realize is that the SCIENCE picture is not a complete one and I don't think it ever will be. Perhaps in the way that the RELIGION picture from the Middle Ages could never be complete either. The philosophy books I have read said that logical positivism (ie materialism) has been disproved. A friend who studied philosophy at Davidson said the big problem in current analytic philosophy is the mind-body problem. It is really difficult to combine all the invisible elements of the world we experience into the billiard ball electron model. 

On top of that decontrstruction (Derrida, Focoult, etc) has shown that Decartes, Kant, Hume were all carving up reality with their theories, not taking off blinders to see everything a-natural (no idea how to write so you say it in that French sounding way). 


Even the great neurologists like Luria and Sacks talk of the "romantic science" and include sentences like this one 

"Empirical science told me that there was not [a soul]--but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Perhaps there is a philisophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean disolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit; and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation." (p 39. The Man who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Oliver Sacks. 1987)

All this to say, let's acknowledge that there the world is so rich we are still working on what kind of map can make sense of it without leaving too much out. We are still working on pictures that don't capture us. 

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