The Multiplicity of Interpreted Worlds: Inner and Outer Perspectives 1666906506, 9781666906509

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mind and World
Inner Lives of Humans
Conscious Self-Awareness in Other Animals
Morality and the Inner Life
Persons and Things
Inwardness and Religion
Interpreted Worlds
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Multiplicity of Interpreted Worlds

The Multiplicity of Interpreted World Inner and Outer Perspectives

Donald A. Crosby

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crosby, Donald A, author. Title: The multiplicity of interpreted worlds : inner and outer perspectives. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "This book argues that the subjective and the objective are crucially dependent on one another and neither is intelligible apart from the other. There is no such thing as a purely external, in-itself world. This book is not intended as a defense of epistemological relativism but as a strong recommendation for modest fallibilism and pluralism"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021051666 (print) | LCCN 2021051667 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666906509 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666906516 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. | Philosophy of mind. | Internalism (Theory of knowledge) | Externalism (Philosophy of mind) Classification: LCC BD161 .C733 2022 (print) | LCC BD161 (ebook) | DDC 121--dc23/eng/20220105 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051666 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051667 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

1

Chapter One: Mind and World



13

Chapter Two: Inner Lives of Humans



31

Chapter Three: Conscious Self-Awareness in Other Animals Chapter Four: Morality and the Inner Life Chapter Five: Persons and Things



Chapter Seven: Interpreted Worlds

Index

49 67 87

Chapter Six: Inwardness and Religion

Bibliography







111 129

145

149

About the Author



155

v

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to an unidentified reader of an earlier draft of this book. The reader’s suggestions were perceptive and pertinent, and they and helped me to improve the book’s exposition and argumentation at critical points. I thank Editor Jana Hodges-Kluck and Assistant Editor Sydney Wedbush of Lexington Books for their always prompt, cheerful, and supportive assistance in the book’s preparation. I also extend my thanks to others at the press for their diligent work in bringing the book to completion. Finally, I want to acknowledge the welcome assistance and concern of my wife Pamela Crosby throughout may writing of the book. We read its each of its chapters out loud together, and she provided thoughtful insight and guidance for improvement of the clarity and convincingness of its statements, arguments, grammar, and style. Imperfections and errors that remain—and they are no doubt many— are the faults of my fallible interpretations of difficult and disputed topics.

vii

Introduction

Scientists have sought from the seventeenth century to the present to describe, explain, and understand the world as it supposedly really is, in and of itself, basing this knowledge on relevant and reliable empirical data. They wanted nature to speak to them directly and to reveal its true character via unimpeachable theories, couched whenever possible in high-level mathematical and logical reasoning, and subjected to replicable experimental tests. They dreamed of steady progress in learning about nature’s laws, processes, and traits with methods of analysis and explanation as transparent as possible to nature itself. They would sit at the feet of nature, as it were, and be educated under her tutelage. In this way, she would slowly but steadily reveal her secrets, showing what she is as one unified system, a single external reality that governs and guides everything that takes place and occurs throughout the history of the universe. The nature thus revealed would be the sum total of reality everywhere, encompassing all cosmic and terrestrial processes, all life, and every aspect of human history and culture as its ultimate basis and support. To know in-itself-reality as a whole was the goal, and science was believed to be capable of making steady progress toward it, gradually overcoming all anomalies in reasoning and discovery and finally arriving at a seamless fabric of theories solving all scientific problems and affording knowledge of the world as it truly is. The world thus discovered, analyzed, and understood would be the one world beyond all the stumbling, misguided, fallible reasoning of the past—and especially of the prescientific past. The peculiarities of subjective, inner experiences, whether of animals or humans, would be transcended by the objective certainties or at least extremely high probabilities of scientific descriptions, explanations, and theories. But barriers kept getting in way. Reputable scientists did not always agree, sometimes on even the most basic theoretical outlooks. Two sweeping scientific revolutions had already taken place by the early twentieth century, each introducing far-ranging changes in confident and pervasive past ways of regarding the world. Would others, equally radical, erupt in the future? Formidable anomalies, inconsistencies, and uncertainties threatened 1

2

Introduction

the accuracy and comprehensiveness of even some of the most basic current theories. Philosophers complained of the obstinate theory-ladenness of experimental tests and of sometimes intractable difficulties in explaining how fundamental theories could be shown to be decisively falsifiable in principle but also as somehow rendered immune to such falsification by relevant experiments. The iron rules of causality and mathematical certainty assumed to apply to all areas of life were threatened by the palpable need for real individual freedom on the part of scientists themselves in devising, testing, sharing, and disagreeing about proposed scientific theories, as well as in convincing their peers of the theories’ truths by appeals to the peers’ presumed freedom of reasoning and judgment. Strict scientific determinism and human morality were also at odds with each other, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant showed so forcefully and convincingly in his Critique of Pure Reason and The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals in the eighteenth century. But without presumption of the freedom of moral choice by the practitioners of science in reporting on their findings, how could science itself function? The arts, so essential to human culture and experience from ancient times to the present, were not amenable to adequate explanation by or reduction to scientific ways of understanding the world—at least not for the less hard-nosed scientists and others who saw in artistic aspiration and expression a sensitivity to dimensions of experience whose truths were not explicable or expressible by scientific ways of thinking. Most importantly, the whole inner world of personal, firsthand, immediate, phenomenological thought and experience on the part of humans as well as of many other animals did not fit easily under the umbrella of the external, objective, operational techniques of analysis and discovery cherished by scientists. Attempted reductions of this inner dimension to these external techniques seemed to leave out more than it attempted to comprehend and account for. Was the world revealed by scientists really the whole, single, all-inclusive world, or was it one of many other ways of viewing the world—or perhaps more properly, “worlds”—that are also essential to keeping its multiple aspects and dimensions in proper focus? Was the scientifically described world really the in-itself world or even a meaningful approximation to such a single, all-inclusive world? Or was science just one way, albeit an undeniably important one, of interpreting and understanding reality? Even more deeply, is there really such a thing as a unitary, uninterpreted, in-itself world existing beneath and beyond the reach of distinct modes of experiencing and understanding—a world for which all interpretations, even scientific ones, can be at their best only approximations?

Introduction

3

To put the question in its most succinct form, is there really such a believable thing as an uninterpreted world? Or are all claims about the world—whether scientific or otherwise—human constructs, historical and cultural—and finally individual—“ways of worldmaking,” to use the felicitous phrase of philosopher Nelson Goodman in his book with this title. If the latter is so, then ultimately many different “worlds” call for recognition, ranging in scope and reliability, to be sure, but none of them, including the most allegedly “hard” sciences, ever free of the limitations, fallibilities, and possibly significant, telling disagreements among even the most qualified experts in a field of investigation. When all of these limiting factors are kept in mind as they relate to human beings, there remains the issue of the inward lives and interpretations of their external environments—whether conscious or otherwise—by humans and other animals that lie beyond the complete grasp of the techniques of objective, external, abstract analysis so rightly prized by scientists. These techniques themselves are outcomes, it should be noted, of the inward, subjective lives of the scientists themselves. Without the capabilities of the inward, there would be no perception of outward objects for such inwardness to focus on, interrogate, or study. And were they not truly outward, such objects would not qualify as mind-independent objects suited for such study. They would be mere projections of the mind. The inner and the outer are dependent on one another, and neither is finally intelligible as such apart from the other. This observation is the central thesis of the present book, and it gives us a lot to take into account, inquire into, and subject to open-minded, careful analysis. Given the irreducible importance of the inner dimensions of the experienced world, there would seem to be no such thing as an uninterpreted world, a purely objective world independent of the limits and pitfalls of interpretation. If this is true, then the search for such a world or even the conception of such a world is based on a delusion. There are better and worse interpretations, but there is no such thing as the absence of interpretation or of any further need of such. Finally, there are in truth as many different worlds, or particular interpretations of the allowances and constraints of their external environments, as there are biological organisms. There are commensurabilities among these worlds as well, but the ineradicable differences of interpretation among them should not be ignored. The central role of interpretation for all life-forms, including the human one, and the multiplicity of such interpretations, ranging from biological species to individual organisms within those species, inveigh against the idea that there is such a thing as a wholly objective, all-inclusive, completely unitary world in and of itself. For world, we have to substitute, in the interest of complete accuracy, the more precise term worlds. Since all worlds are interpreted worlds, there are

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Introduction

many such worlds. This manyness includes all aspects of the earthly creatures’ respective environments that have for them special priority, importance, meaning, and value. These aspects constitute their worlds. This statement applies to us human creatures as well. To say something truly comprehensive about even the earth, to say nothing of the vast universe beyond the earth, requires that all of these diverse inward and interpretive earthly perspectives be acknowledged and given their due. My interpretations of the world around me are different, to cite only one telling example, from those of the magnificent great blue heron my wife and I spot while strolling around a beautiful lake surrounded by ancient live oak trees whose massive limbs and evergreen leaves are bedecked with Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. The long-limbed, long-necked heron creeps stealthily along the weedy edge of a lake looking for fish. It spots one and swiftly grabs it with its long pointed beak. It then proceeds to gulp the wriggling fish down. Having fished out one area of the lake, it leaps easily into the air and begins to glide over the lake with gentle motions of its massive wings, the span of which is that of the average height of a man. It is just as able, when it chooses, gracefully to soar above the trees that encircle the lake, perhaps to fish or hunt for other prey such as frogs, salamanders, or rodents elsewhere. I, on the other hand, do not routinely gulp down wriggling fish or similar prey for my meals. In fact, I am a vegetarian and do not eat any kind of meat. I certainly do not just casually leap upward and begin to climb into the sky by means of outstretched, resplendently feathered, easily manipulated wings that are huge parts of my body. My mating and parenting styles are quite different from those of the heron. For example, I do not typically lay sticks at the feet of a female human being with the hope of enticing her to use them in the building of her nest for what may become our progeny. Nor do I regurgitate food into the nests of my children for them hungrily to devour. And I definitely do not sleep overnight on the branches of trees. I am wary of heights, especially when there is no means of ample support beneath me. The heron, on the other hand, is at home in the air and can navigate through it confidently toward its destinations. It rises easily to great heights and has no fear of falling. It is bound to interpret and experience its world differently than I do mine. There is no way in which our differently experienced and interpreted worlds can be made completely commensurate. I can observe the stalking heron, and it can observe me. There is commonality between our two worlds. However, it sees me as I approach it at the lake as a potential interruption, distraction, or threat, while I just marvel at its strange and awesome blue-hued beauty from afar. Our two worlds do intersect, but they are also quite different in major respects. I cannot know with any immediacy or depth of detail what it is like to be the heron or to

Introduction

5

view its world from its perspectives, and it cannot know how I view the world from mine. What is it like to be a blue heron? I am even less able to answer such a question than I am to have comprehensive knowledge of what it is like to be another human being and to experience its self and its world from its own perspective. In both cases, preoccupation with assumed similarities should not be allowed to blind us to irreducible differences. My relation to the heron is only one such example of what I have in mind, but let it stand here as to suggest the countless others on the face of the earth that could be referenced to illustrate the point at issue. No two inner worlds, whether of humans or nonhumans, are ever exactly the same. And in consequence, no two outer worlds brought into focus by these inner worlds are identical to one another. Their similarities do not cancel out or render unimportant their differences. Moreover, at least tacit recognition must be given to the extreme likelihood of other forms of life elsewhere in the universe, each of them with their own interpretive perspectives on their outward environments. Seen in this way, the world is irreducibly many, not ever to be mistakenly regarded as ­finally or fundamentally one. The world is a blend of its inward interpreters and the outward things they interpret, and the first cannot be shunted aside in favor of the second. The upshot of these considerations is that the manyness of the world should not be sacrificed to inappropriate, exclusive insistence on its unity, and that its role as a system of myriad outward objects should not be detached from the inward perspectives and interpretations of its innumerable living subjects. I argue in this book, following the reasoning of philosopher Evan Thompson in his insightful book Mind in Life that all life-forms exhibit the crucial traits of autopoiesis, sense-making, and purpose, and that these traits qualify them as subjects with inward perspectives on, or interpretations of, their respective environments or worlds. For those who may be put off by the idea that the world is an interpreted world, not less so for us humans than for any other creatures, I recommend the wise observation of philosopher John Dewey: “The limited world of our observation and reflection becomes the Universe only through imaginative extension. It cannot be apprehended in knowledge nor realized in reflection” (1962: 18–19). For “imaginative extension” I can substitute “inward interpretation,” but I strongly agree with Dewey’s essential point that all conceptions of the world (or worlds) are interpretations, and that there is no such thing as a world (or worlds) that is not an interpretation rather than a supposedly in-itself reality existing independently of interpretation or having some kind of knowable status lying beyond fallible interpretations. Such a ghostly, free-floating, purely external world, even were it to be acknowledged to exist, would have no meaning for us human interpreters or

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Introduction

for any of the other nonhuman interpreters of this earth. The only real world (or worlds) for us humans is the world (or worlds) intimately connected with our inner lives of experience, imagination, and reason. The same is true, appropriate qualifications having been made to take account of the differences among their respective inner lives, for all the other living creatures of the earth. The inner and the outer are inseparably conjoined. World or worlds are inevitably interpreted world or worlds. I suggest three analogies by way of further explaining and defending this crucial point. First, consider the question, where is Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony? Is it in the score? Is it in the music? Is it in the performance? If so, which performance? Does each performance simply replicate the score? Or does each conductor of a performance have the orchestra interpret the score differently? If the latter, then the music is not always the same. The score has no meaning apart from the music it symbolizes. The music has no meaning apart from its performances. And the performances require interpretations of the music. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, therefore, exists in the combinations of score, music, performance, and interpretation. And the three beyond the score are inevitably varied, not the same. Sometimes even assessment of the accuracy of copies of the original score requires interpretive questions and responses. A similar account can be given of the Iliad, commonly attributed to Homer. It probably had its origin in oral songs and recitations performed over countless years by many different persons. There may have been a number of such versions existing before one or more of them was rendered into a single written form. And there may well have been a few poetic geniuses along the way of those singing, reciting, and endlessly revising the accumulating and varying verses at different points before what came to be the written and now existing masterpiece of literature. The singular contributions of such imagined geniuses would help to account for its astoundingly high quality as a work of art (see Kirsch 2021).1 When finally rendered into writing, the work was read and interpreted by different individuals, and it came to be translated into other languages from its original Ancient Greek. The translations differed from one another in subtleties of meaning as well as form because all translation is a kind of interpretation. When we read the Iliad today, we each imagine and interpret it in our own manner, whether in minor or major ways. There is no such thing as an Iliad lying behind interpretation; no in-itself Iliad. A given text of the epic, in Greek or some other language, is real enough in its own way. But the finally real Iliad is the Iliad of a particular reader’s and ponderer’s own heart and mind. There are incalculably many of these, just as there have been countless persons involved in its production, transmission, translation, and interpretation through the ages. The real Iliad is the interpreted Iliad that intermingles

Introduction

7

the inner with the outer. This fact can be seen with especial clarity when we compare the translations into different languages with one another. We then have to add the readers of these various translations, and the differences of their interpretive readings, with one another. With these and similar examples, we are led to the conclusion that Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and the Iliad probably falsely attributed solely to a man named Homer are not really singular but multiple in their character. The music and the epic have meaning only through such interpretive strategies as conducting, performance, recitation, writing, translation, and reading. Similarly, the ones and zeros of a digital computer program have meaning only when they are translated by interpretive schemes into the words and syntax of a language or into mathematical or some other kind of intelligible symbolism. Even then, they are meaningless until interpreted by someone who knows the symbolism well enough to make sense of it. The computer has no semantic savvy. It is just openings and closings of electronic circuits. Its meanings, therefore, require combinations of types of machinery and their human creators and interpreters. Even when a computer’s humanly interpreted meanings are rendered onto a screen or onto paper, these meanings may need to be translated into various languages for use by speakers and readers of those languages. Interpretations of its meanings in a language common to different interpreters may also differ in significant ways from one another. What applies to musical compositions, literary works, and computers applies also to world-making. A world is a combination of the external environments of an organism and its particular interpretations by that organism. These environments have different meanings due to the different interpretations organisms make of them. And as organisms differ from one another, not only by species but also as individuals within those species, so their worlds differ from one another. This observation is no less true of human organisms than it is of other forms of life. Their inner lives of different kinds of mind (in Thompson’s broad sense of this term) interact with their outer environments, and these interactions constitute their different worlds. It is true that these various kinds of interaction have much in common with one another, enabling organisms to inhabit a world together. But the commonalities do not erase the differences, and the differences are often quite substantial, as when we compare a bacterium with a buffalo, a human being with an octopus, or Shakespeare’s visions of the world with those of a minor playwright. “World” is thus both one and many, and the outer oneness is dependent on and finally subordinate to the profuse manyness of varying interpretations of its meaning that underlie it. Take away interpretations, and we take away world. And such interpretations of world are incalculably many.

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Introduction

Interpretation does not create reality. It can only model aspects of it, doing so in selective or abstract ways, never doing more than vaguely approximating or adumbrating the whole of it in its massively outward, to say nothing of its subjectively inward, depth and detail. I lay stress on the plurality of worlds because I believe that our conceptions of the world should acknowledge the manyness of its interpreters along with their many different experiences of their surrounding worlds. This insistence is, of course, itself an interpretation, but only interpreted worlds are available to us, as I argue in this book. Interpretations can be better or worse, more or less accurate and inclusive, more or less rationally compelling, and so on. But there is no escape from the conclusion that all such worlds are interpreted worlds. Even to aspire toward a completely in-itself, all-inclusive, single, non-interpreted world is to set out on a futile journey. In insisting on this point, do I confuse epistemology with metaphysics, as an anonymous reader of a draft of this book has suggested? The reader raises an important question, and here is my answer to it. I am a metaphysical pluralist. For me, the multiplicity of interpreted worlds alerts us to the conviction that there is no single system of the world as a whole. The world or, more properly, nature, is a congeries of innumerable systems and subsystems, none of which contains all of the others. No system is unrelated to at least some other systems, while it is equally the case that no one system is related to all other systems. Therefore, there is no container called the world that encompasses everything else. This is my metaphysical conjecture. Its pluralism is consistent with my endorsement of epistemological pluralism. The principal influences for both on me in this regard are A Pluralistic Universe by William James and Metaphysics of Natural Complexes by Justus Buchler. The rest of this book traces out important implications of this conclusion and of its intimate connection with the critical interrelations of the inner and outer aspects of the multidimensional, multi-perspectival world in which we live. These implications bear on such issues as the world’s innumerable modes of existence; the nature of life as it pertains to all living beings; the character and scope of conscious forms of life; the reach of rationality and agential power among the creatures of the earth; our moral obligations to types of living beings different from our own, especially to the extent that these obligations depend on our taking seriously into account the inwardness of those lives; our moral responsibilities to one another as human beings that turn critically on recognition of the similarities but also the substantial differences among one another’s unique inner lives; the crucial relations of inwardness and outwardness in religious lives; and the immense importance and

Introduction

9

value of recognizing and affirming diverse interpretations of the world—as opposed to trying to reduce the world to a single, all-comprehending perspective, and especially one that purports to be exclusively external or even finally deterministic and machinelike in character. What follows is a summary of each of the remaining chapters of the book. Chapter 1: “Mind and World.” This chapter defends the multiplicity of interpreted worlds against the claim that there is really such a thing as a single uninterpreted, in-and-of itself world to which all such interpretations must be held responsible. Differently interpreted worlds include those of innumerable nonhuman creatures as well as those of human creatures, because all such creatures have “mind” consisting of autopoeisis, sense-making, and purposiveness, and these minds differently interpret the worlds or outer environs of these creatures. Commonalities among these worlds enable interactions and communications among them, but these are commonalities in the midst of irreducible differences. The inner and outer are therefore intimately related; neither can be separated from the other. There is no such thing as a purely objective, all-encompassing, single world. Recognition of the inner perspectives and worlds of all of the earth’s life-forms has important consequences for environmental ethics that the chapter describes and defends. Chapter 2: “Inner Lives of Humans.” This chapter focuses on the conscious inner lives of human beings. It explores the nature of human consciousness in the two aspects of the inward awareness of self and of the awareness of an outward world. Humans’ consciousness of self is compared and contrasted with the conception of the psyche—commonly translated from Greek into English as “soul”— developed by Plato and Aristotle. To avoid confusion, I set aside “soul” in favor of “self.” Conscious self-awareness and world awareness are described in some detail, with emphasis placed on the self’s capacity for rational analysis and genuine agency or freedom, along with its experiences of the allowances and constraints of an external world, as interpreted, understood, and responded to by each individual self. The self is also seen as a function of the human body, not something separate or separable from it. The chapter contends that consciousness is not restricted to human beings but exists in varying degrees in innumerable nonhuman life-forms as well, even though not in all life-forms. However, no kind of life should be regarded as a mere mechanism or manipulable, purely external thing to be put to use solely for human gratification or use. Chapter 3: “Conscious Self-Awareness in Other Animals.” The last two sentences of the summary of chapter 2 anticipate the focus of chapter 3, which is on compelling evidence for the conscious awareness, freedom of choice, rational activity, and cultural accomplishment and learning of three types of animal—octopuses, sperm whales, and New Caledonian crows— selected as telling examples of the existence of robust nonhuman animal

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Introduction

consciousness. And different conceptions of and responses to the world are consciously entertained and engaged by different kinds of conscious animals, meaning that their worlds differ from one another as differently interpreted worlds. The necessary correlations and interdependencies of the inner and outer are vividly illustrated in these three cases. And they are also reminders of the kind of respectful treatment that should be accorded to all nonhuman life-forms, treatment that is brought into special focus when the animals are gifted, as countless ones are, with a consciousness similar in important respects to our own. Chapter 4: “Morality and the Inner Life.” The moral life, properly regarded, involves not only deserved recognition of the externally observable positive accomplishments and commendable outward actions of others but also open-spirited consideration, respect, and care for the experiences, aspirations, and struggles of each person’s unique inner life. A case for this view is developed in connection with two main characters in one of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. This view of the moral life, based to a significant extent on a book by Robert Kane, is then extended to include all other kinds of life, and especially those with at least some degree of consciousness. In all cases, human or otherwise, we are warned against treating humans and other living beings as mere objects or things but as having internal lives similar in important respects to our own. Chapter 5: “Persons and Things.” The seductive allure of the machine model of all reality, including living beings, is discussed in this chapter. Its allure of objectification of everything in order to make everything completely observable and explicable—an allure especially notable in some interpretations of the task and in the interest of a claimed omni-competence of the natural sciences—is shown not only to be unachievable in principle but also self-contradictory. There is an inwardness of freedom in human intentionality, for example, that cannot be reduced to efficient causality alone. Scientists must rely on freely developed intentions in their attempts to convince one another of the truth of their findings. Thus, despite its great utility in some contexts, the machine model, with its admirable complete predictability of functioning, has only limited use as a means of understanding humans. Machines are automatic. Persons combine relative automaticity of some of their processes with the genuine autonomy of others. Attempted reduction of persons to machinelike objects, advocated or practiced by scientists or others, has the effect of making persons susceptible to objectification and, with that, to possible merciless exploitation. The chapter notes some of the kinds of deplorable exploitation that human beings are subjected to at the hands of other humans when they are treated as mere objects or things. The same is true of other living beings as well, but the focus of this chapter is on human persons. The final part of the chapter briefly describes

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the miraculous character of human consciousness with its many capacities and accomplishments, including each conscious person’s firsthand interpretations of that person’s outer environment and surrounding world. Chapter 6: “Inwardness and Religion.” This chapter emphasizes the crucial role of inwardness in fully committed religious lives. It uses the theistic religion of biblically rooted Judaism and the meditational religion of Theravada Buddhism to illustrate this contention. The enjoined outer lives of these two traditions are exceedingly important, but they are claimed to flow from and give expression to their respective inward forms of experience, commitment, and faith. In consequence, the respectively authorized characters of these outer lives turn out to be in many ways notably similar. Thus not only is faith without works acknowledged to be dead in both traditions, but it is also true that works without the requisite forms of faith lack essential sources of empowerment and direction. To reduce the inward dimensions of any religion to its outward behaviors and practices, undeniably important as the latter are, would be to extract the taproot of its distinctive character and contributions to the world. The inner and outward aspects of all religions work necessarily together. Neither can be separated from the other, either in accurate interpretation of a religion’s nature or in adequate understanding of its warranted practices. Chapter 7: “Interpreted Worlds.” This chapter presents conclusive arguments for the thesis that there is no such thing as an uninterpreted, in-itself world. This thesis rejects even the idea of a God’s-eye view of the world on the ground that God cannot enter into and truly comprehend all of the innumerable finite, firsthand perspectives on the world, reducing them all to God’s single experience, without destroying or rendering finally unreal the multi-perspectival worlds allegedly experienced and wholly known by God. The only way God could totally know the world would be for only God to exist, in which case there would be no world for God to know. In this Introduction, I intend only to suggest or briefly indicate reasons for concluding that the world is always an interpreted world (or, more accurately, many differently interpreted worlds) and how its inner and outward aspects, correctly acknowledged and understood, make this conclusion inescapable. Such reasons will be developed more fully in discussions throughout the rest of the book. And implications of setting aside the long-held, widely assumed idea of a single, in-itself, uninterpreted world will be traced out in detail as the chapters unfold. Such implications range over and profoundly affect many different areas of thought and experience. The idea of a single, all-encompassing perspective also founders on the relentless creative, destructive, and transformative effects of time. The notion of an in-itself, non-perspectival world pales in comparison with the immense value and importance of a world admitting of wondrously diverse

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Introduction

perspectives, present at any time and coming into being and out of being over endless time. Such diversity should be welcomed and cherished. Some perspectives are admittedly much more accurate and comprehensive than others, but none is or can be absolutely correct or all-inclusive. Many more than any single one of them, scientific or otherwise, can provide useful and muchneeded angles of vision into an endlessly complex, ever-changing world. The world is many, not one, and it eludes capture or comprehension by any single interpretation or perspective. The dream of an uninterpreted, in-itself world is the dream of a world well-lost. The distinctive character of the inner cannot be left behind in pursuit of the outer. A lot of epistemology, morality, aesthetics, religion, metaphysics, ecological responsibility, and the like hangs on this crucial point, as I argue throughout the book. I do not defend epistemological relativism herein, but I do robustly defend epistemological pluralism and fallibilism. NOTE 1. The classicist to whom Kirsch refers in the title of this article for his momentous thesis about the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, first presented in the 1930s, is the Harvard professor Milman Parry, who died at the young age of thirty-five in that same decade. Kirsch notes that Parry’s work was later made more public and famous by his former research assistant Albert Lord, in a book aptly entitled The Singer of Tales, published in 1960.

Chapter One

Mind and World

There would be no such thing as minds without the world that produces those minds and is their impetus and focus, and no such thing as a meaningful world for us humans without the analyses, recollections, expectations, dispositions, and feelings of our minds. The internal perspectives of our individual minds interact with the mildly or forcibly experienced inputs of a world commonly presumed to be distinct from our minds. There would be no public language without a public world, but language is a product and resource of the conscious minds of humans. There is no mental ghost within a supposed machine of the body, and the living human body itself is ultimately no mere machine, devoid of a pervasive richness of conscious awareness and agential power. The world includes minds but is not restricted to minds. Mind and world are not separate orders of being. Instead, mind is a function of matter, not something set over against the world of matter. There is even a continually presupposed and ever active field of awareness within which each of us is conscious of herself or himself as such, making it possible for an internal “I” to be aware of an equally internal “me” as an object of its awareness. In other words, I can think about myself and think about myself as the subject of my acts of thinking. I can engage in meta-thinking or thinking about thinking, and about me engaged in the act of thinking. In a word, object and subject, outer and inner, are correlative conceptions. Neither is intelligible without the other, but it is also the case that neither is reducible to the other. There is no meaningful outer without a meaningful inner, and vice versa. The creativity of Michelangelo is not reducible to descriptions of the interacting functions of the molecules of his body, and there could not even be such descriptions without the distinctive functions of mind doing the describing. Moreover, no mere external perspective on or treatment of his art could begin to comprehend or do justice to it without reference to the inner states of his mind to which it gives expression or of our own minds as we respond to it. Paintings are not mere daubs of paint on a canvas, and sculptures are more 13

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than a chipped-out piece of marble. They are products of mind that require perceptions of mind if their significance is to be apprehended. However, as the nineteenth century philosopher Victoria Welby properly reminds us, “outer” and “inner” are metaphors that can all too easily mislead us if we are not careful. She remarks, Through the influence of that [metaphorical] usage we instinctively try to make our minds, our ideas and thoughts, behave as if they were shut up inside definite bounds, that is, as if they were objects in space. Hence a false psychology, and educational ideals and methods that aim at the development—or production—of thinking machines, from which you grind out any desired product, coupled with a thought-cabinet with innumerable drawers, a thought cupboard with innumerable shelves and cavities. (1985: 22)

In discussing the metaphor of an “inward” mind, Welby warns in this passage against converting mind into the operation of an “outward” machine, anticipating in this manner the computer model of the mind favored by some thinkers today. But computers have no literal mind, memory, or patterns of thought. They have no mental inwardness or awareness. We assign mind-like meanings to their complex mechanical processes through symbolizations, interpretations, and translations from our own minds, and we read back from them what we have built into them. But to return to the main point of Welby’s observation, the mind is not literally inside the organic body, and the organic body is not literally outside the mind. The distinction is one of different perspectives, not one of different spatial locations or distinct metaphysical entities. Mind is a function of material bodies, and material bodies of an extremely complex sort produce and enable the powers of mind as a new emergent type of physical being. CONCEPTIONS OF THE WORLD AND ITS EXISTENCE I do not mean to argue that if humans were to disappear, the world would cease to exist, only that what we humans are aware of and conceive of as the world would no longer be present to our minds or perspectives as such. There would be no world for us, no meaningful relation of any of us to the world. Mind and our world, human selves and world, would disappear together. “World” would be a cipher without meaningful character or content. The inner world of consciousness and the outer world of which it is conscious are phenomenologically entangled, each crucially dependent on the other. There would be no comprehensible objective world without a subjective arena within which it is encountered, experienced, and contemplated, and

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no subjective world without basis in an objective one that not only creates, sustains, and makes it possible but that is also the persistent, obdurate focus of its awareness. A dualistic separation of mind and body, self and world, conceptual framing and what the conceptual framing purports to be about, ignores the integral, inseparable relationships of the two. The philosophical theories of eliminative materialism and subjective idealism are equally implausible because the first theory dispenses with the qualitative, inner mind within whose scope the nonmental world heaves into view, while the second theory leaves unexplained and unaccounted for the crucial role of the body in the development, support, and facilitation of all theories, including this one. Eliminative materialism is false because one-sided, and idealism false for the same reason. The first reduces the subjective to the objective, as if there were no such thing as feelings, beliefs, intentions, or intended actions. The second reduces the objective to the subjective, making the world a phantom of the mind. But the external world for each conscious being is the world of which it is aware and capable of becoming increasingly aware—a world it encounters and is routinely affected by, rather than arbitrarily creates—while the inner mental world of which it is also aware is a non-eliminable, constituent part of its being. Were our minds not founded upon and located within a shared, mutually accessible, objective world, there could be no communications among them, no language common to them, no possibility of my doing what I am even now endeavoring to do, namely, writing this book in order to enable you, my reader, to comprehend and consider the observations, claims, and arguments it contains. To the extent that my words have meaning to you, the thinking I attempt to convey with these words becomes a part of your subjective awareness, whether you agree or disagree with aspects of it. You must also relate my words to aspects of your own thought and experience. To the extent that any person becomes part of my objective world, that person also becomes part of my subjective one. Object and subject, inner and outer, are logically and not contingently related to one another. They relate to one another in the final analysis because they are inseparable from one another, despite any theories that would attempt to tear them apart or to conceive of the one entirely apart from the other. This is the view I shall defend throughout these pages. The philosopher Nelson Goodman articulates a view similar to this one when he states that without some kind of mental framing, there would be no meaningful world for any of us and no possibility of meaningful discourse or communication with one another about such a putative world. If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference, but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described.

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Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds. (1978: 2–3)

A bit later in his book, he has this say: “Talk of unstructured content or an unconceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating; for the talk imposes structure, conceptualizes, ascribes properties. Although conception without perception is merely empty, perception without conception is blind, totally inoperative (6). Thus a mentally unstructured (or unframed) content, an unconceptualized given, or some kind of worldly substratum assumed to be without properties—a world wholly removed from the contexts and contributions of mind—is literally unthinkable, inconceivable, and incommunicable. Were there no world for someone or from the perspective of someone or something, there would be no meaningful, relatable world but only brute, blind, impenetrable mystery. There would be no self to relate to world and no world to relate to self. World is by its very nature an object within a theater of awareness, neither wholly created nor framed by that theater but also not wholly independent of it. This is not to say that all worldviews are equally plausible or true, because some do better than others in adjusting what is “in here” to what is “out there,” as well as framing what is supposedly “out there” to what is “in here.” Not anything goes; some outlooks “go” much more fittingly than others. Concepts of world and of relations to world are not arbitrary constructions or sheer inventions. There are issues of predictability, replicability, obduracy, utility, and the like to be considered, as well as those of coherence, elegance, and plausibility in theoretical hypotheses. But it is also possible for there to be a number of comprehensive world outlooks and world theories that complement one another instead of contradicting one another. And they do so by their ability to bring into coherent and convincing relationship the two aspects of mind and world. What is to be resisted at all costs is the reduction of one of these domains into the other because such a reduction destroys the necessary conceptual and lived dependence of the one on the other. My discussion so far poses the further question: Is it only humans and their inward lives and minds, on the one hand, and worlds existing as lived relations to those human minds, on the other? Or is this analysis applicable to nonhuman sentient beings as well? And if the latter, how far up and down the scale of species does such sentience reach? That is, what sorts of organisms does it encompass? We want to do as much justice as we can to the inner lives of organic beings, as well as to the outer contexts, references, and dependencies of their experiences. What, then, is the scope of sentience and, thus, of worlds presupposed by and indicated by sentience? I take up this issue in the next section.

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THE SCOPE OF SENTIENCE Psychologist-philosopher William James speaks of the “primordial chaos of sensations” and of “that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world.” Out of such an original chaos of unnamed, uncategorized, and amorphous material, he continues, we humans and our ancestors “by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated, like sculptors” working on a featureless block of marble, a commonly assumed world of familiar categories, descriptions, and meanings (James 1950, Vol. I, 289–90). In consequence, modern humans have arrived at a generally assumed world picture around which they can organize their lives, thoughts, and expectations. The picture varies to some extent for particular human subjects, but running through the inevitable differences of historical, cultural, and personal attitudes, emphases, and perspectives are enough pervasive similarities to allow for an external world common to all or at least most contemporary human beings. But other minds, namely, the sentient operations of nonhuman organisms, show that “my world” or the world familiar to and largely taken for granted by humans “is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!” James winds up this intriguing discussion by observing, “Even the trodden worm . . . contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he may have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place” (289–90). James does an admirable job in these few pages of his renowned 1890 work, The Principles of Psychology, of describing the radical interdependency and inseparability of mind and world, of perceiver and perceived, and of at least suggesting their extension into the nonhuman realm of living beings. According to philosopher Evan Thompson, in his appropriately entitled book Mind in Life, sentience—or a kind of mind—goes constantly together with life over the whole range of life-forms, including in at least some degree even the simplest or most primitive ones. There is no life without some kind of mind, just as there is no mind apart from some kind of life. But what does Thompson mean by the term sentience, and how plausible and convincing is his view of it and his conception of its necessary connection with all kinds of life? I want to discuss this question here because it is essential to analysis of the integral, inseparable relations of the inner and outer realms of mind and world. To the extent that an organism of any size or type is capable of entertaining and responding to a world beyond itself, just to that extent will there

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be a world for itself. World and self will then be inescapably bound together rather than existing apart from one another. Thompson argues that there are two essential traits definitive of all forms of life, and these two together entail a third one. The first trait is autopoeisis, the second is sentience, and the third is purposiveness. The third trait, as I shall soon explain, is for him implicit in the other two. The three of them together point to the unbreakable tie for all types of life between the inwardness of life and the outwardness of world. There can be no convincing claim to understand any form of life when neglecting these three traits or their pointing to an organism’s inner perspectives on what function for it as vitally necessary aspects of an outer world. What does it mean to be alive? In Thompson’s view, it means for an entity to be self-making and self-maintaining by drawing on resources outside itself, and in that way appropriating, from its internal perspective, specific kinds of meaning, value, and support from those resources. A living organism has an internal self, in other words, that exists and is sustained in intricate relationship with and in felt dependency on what serves as its external world. Its self-making and self-maintaining constitute its autopoeisis. Its appropriation of meaning, value, and support from its environment is its sentience or “sense-making” (Thompson 2007: 157) in relation to its environment. In these two ways, it strives to make and sustain for itself an inner life and distinctive character in relation to an external environment, exhibiting in this way a third necessary trait of life, namely, a kind of intentionality or purpose. Its sentience or cognition is an active, agential process, not a passive adaption to its environment. It is “behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the [living] system itself enacts on the basis of its autonomy” (159). This behavior or conduct requires active, ongoing adaptation, assimilation, and accommodation to an external environment. Thus, a living being can be understood as “a system whose activity brings forth or constitutes a world” (159). There would be no such world apart from the living being’s inner life, and its inner life would not be possible without its relations to and reliance on its external world. The inner and the outer are therefore inseparable, meaning that an attempt either to understand an organism’s life exclusively from the outside or from the inside would be futile. One must take seriously the external environment of an organism and its requirement for the organism’s life, but also the organism’s inner perspective on, autopoietic adaptations to, interpretations of, and active engagements with its environment. Thompson’s term sentience, which he also refers to as cognition (159) may in numerous cases involve but does not necessarily connote some degree of consciousness in an organism. Bacteria, for example, are not conscious but exhibit the above three traits of a living being. Viruses, in contrast, are not

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alive, according to Thompson, because they must make use of the metabolism of host cells and have no metabolism of their own. They are therefore “not self-maintaining in the autopoietic sense” (104; see also 123). The inner self-making, sentient, and purposive character of all life, on the basis of an external environment or world specific to particular forms of life, is for Thompson the necessary foundation for the emergence of consciousness—from its earlier, more primitive and inchoate forms, through animals with varying degrees of more sophisticated kinds of self-awareness in savvy creatures such as parrots, whales, elephants, and apes, and to the highly developed, acute consciousness and self-consciousness of human beings. The inwardness of life is the precondition for the inwardness of conscious awareness. This is what Thompson means when he refers to “Life in Mind”: the main title of his book. A summary assertion of the ideas I am outlining here is contained in his statement: “Living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth significance and value. In this way, the environment becomes a place of valence, of attraction and repulsion, approach or escape” (158). The significance and value are developed from the environment and for the selfhood of all living beings. Inner and outer are tightly conjoined. This is why an attempt to understand an organism’s life from either aspect independently from the other is doomed to failure. An organism has both a subjective and an objective aspect, and neither can function as such or have adequate intelligibility apart from the other. A phenomenological and not just an objective, external, mechanical scientific approach is essential to a full understanding of an organism’s life, in Thompson’s considered judgment. A meaningful, fully taken into account inclusion of the former approach requires that we see all living organisms, from bacteria to humans, as having an inward life and a sense of selfhood and self-agency as analogous at least to some significant extent to our own subjective inner lives as human organisms. Therefore, Thompson argues, “In observing other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, through the evidence of our own experience and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness as proper to a living being” (163). As creatures possessed of acute, pervasive senses of inwardness, self-awareness, and purposiveness, we humans are fortunately equipped to acknowledge and subject to investigation the inwardness of all forms of life. We should not neglect to take this inwardness fully into consideration when reflecting on life-forms other than our own. Thompson makes an extensive, well-informed, and well-reasoned case for this conclusion in his wide-ranging book, and it is one with which I strongly concur.

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EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL ENCOUNTERS, PERSPECTIVES, AND ANALYSES The natural sciences provide us with many invaluable kinds of external or objective ways of studying organic life, including our own human lives as organic beings. They are equipped to do so with a wide range of techniques, procedures, and theories, all designed to deal in impersonal, objective, and often complex, highly specialized mathematical and other analytical ways with the constituents, structures, and functionings of organic bodies, their adaptations to their environments, the relations of such bodies to one another in ecosystems, and the living and nonliving parts of such ecosystems that feed, support, protect, and enable the bodies to flourish and survive. The focus of these sciences is on organic organization and behavior, on what can be studied from the outside—not on what might be shared from within the life of organisms, their firsthand phenomenological experiences. The knowledge thus provided can be widely disseminated and understood without any concern for or mention of the inner, “mindful” lives of organic beings to which Evan Thompson devotes so much concerted attention. External behaviors can be taken into account, but there is no presently available purely scientific way to access or seek to comprehend the inward lives of organisms entirely on the basis of such behavior. Questions about what it is like to be such a creature and to comprehend and relate to the particular world the creature forms for itself and has attitudes about or perspectives on from within, is left out of account. A thoroughgoing scientific description and explanation, despite its immense importance and value, cannot exhaustively communicate what it is like to be an organism or to have a perspective on its world from its own self-like, internally-centered perspective. This deficiency or limitation of the natural sciences, despite their irreplaceable significance, can be compensated for by other approaches to organic beings that seek to do a least some justice to their inner lives and experiences. In his magnificent book A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, acclaimed conservationist and student of ecology Aldo Leopold makes this observation: It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow creatures, a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. (1989: 109)

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The “kinship” of which Leopold speaks can be fully experienced only when we seek to take into account the idea that these other natural beings are similar to ourselves in their possession of inner lives, experiences, and perspectives—lives whose inner outlooks and external worlds are intimately connected with and necessary to one another. We need, as Leopold insists in another part of his book, to learn to think like a wolf, a deer, an aspen, and even to bring within the gamut of our thinking the mountain on which they roam or are situated, if we are to experience our kinship with them at the deepest levels of appreciation and understanding (129–133). It is one thing to see an organism as a complexly structured and functioning material or bodily system. And the natural sciences assist us immeasurably in this regard. But it is another thing to see the organism as a lively field of experience, with intimate relations between its mind and its world, a field of experience that is in many ways similar to our human experiences of ourselves and the world. If an organism can be legitimately interpreted to be saying to us, “I am a self, even as you are a self,” real kinship and community can be achieved. There is no such thing as community among mechanical dolls or automata, or among us humans and living creatures regarded and treated as such. Think, by way of analogy, of the difference between responding to a human person as merely an object—important, if at all, solely for our use and manipulation, on the one hand—and responding to him or her as a being with deeply felt needs, fears, aspirations, and values similar to those of oneself, on the other. The phenomenological approach puts one in touch with another human being in a way that an exclusively objective approach cannot, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of a phenomenological approach to nonhuman organisms like that argued for by Thompson. Only in the latter case does the Golden Rule have any meaning or value, because in this instance I am enabled to think of another organism as I think of myself and to aspire to treat it as I would like to be treated. To cultivate this attitude is laudable when directed toward our fellow humans as well as toward other late-arrived human organisms, all of us relatively far along on the path of evolutionary development and sentient awareness. But in seeking to do so, we can also strive to cultivate empathetic consideration and respect for the other less-complex but all still sentient and thus living organisms (in Thompson’s senses of these two terms). We humans can do so, keeping well in mind that—among other things—these simpler life-forms enable, through their many indispensable ecological roles, more complex ones like ourselves to exist and flourish. Even these less-complex forms of life have an inner nature akin in important respects to our own. We are all in this system of nature together, we have traits in common despite our many other differences, and we have extensive need for one

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another. Science and phenomenology can join hands to direct us toward fuller understanding of and more compassionate relations with our nonhuman kin. The inwardness of our human lives enables us to recognize its resemblances to the inward lives of other creatures of this earth, on the one hand, even as we devote ourselves to scientific study of the outward, externally observable aspects of these nonhuman lives, on the other. Thompson draws repeatedly on the work of well-known philosophical phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Hans Jonas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in developing this critically important case (see, for example, 231–32, 162–65, and especially 382–416). ECOLOGICAL RESPONSIBILITY AND EMPATHETIC CONCERN There need be little doubt that attitudes of self-interest, self-endangerment, and self-protection can be strong incentives for human beings to be concerned about finding effective ways to respond to the ecological crisis currently threatening their customary modes of life, their economies, their progenies, their present civilization, and their species. Humans can have these attitudes without needing or bothering to care about the inner experiences of nonhuman lives whose own species are in many cases even more direly and immediately threatened than the human species by global climate change and the other symptoms of impending ecological disaster. Solely self-centered, prudential, and self-protective outlooks can carry humans some way and perhaps even help to motivate them over time to make some progress toward finding and implementing collective strategies and techniques for responding to the crisis. This scenario presupposes, of course, sufficient time for such an entirely human-centered motivation to seriously kick in—which is by no means a sure thing. Considerable progress is needed at present even to convince sizable numbers of humans that there is such a thing as a global ecological crisis that demands urgent recognition and response. Evidences of many kinds in this regard are investigated, announced, and warned of by the natural sciences, but these tend to be downplayed or ignored by many—partly through lack of attention, partly because of their threats to established economic institutions and practices, partly because of their indications of the need for widespread individual and social sacrifices and changes, and partly because of competitive and divisive party politics preoccupied myopically with winning the next election rather than being focused on long-range human—to say nothing of earth-wide—well-being. Moreover, concern for pressing problems near to home can trump attentions to problems affecting human beings elsewhere in the world, meaning

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that even an admittedly strong prudential motivation to personal and social self-interest tends quickly to pale, the wider the circumference extends beyond oneself and one’s more immediate social groups. A similar relatively swift fading of commitment and concern tends to characterize an imagined future that stretches more than slightly beyond the familiar commitments and concerns, patterns of thought and action, of one’s own time. Hence, prudential motivations tend at best to be notably short range both in space and time. By themselves, they cannot be sufficiently relied on for bringing about fundamental, far-reaching changes of thought and action, either in individual persons or in social institutions. Prudential, self-interested motivations have an important role to play, to be sure, but they can only have limited effects by themselves and require supplementation by other kinds of inducement and appeal. Phenomenologically rooted care and concern for our earthly kin, and not just a scientifically based focus on our own well-being and survival as humans, are called for. We are no more insulated from these other creatures than they are from us. Their inner and outer worlds of autopoeisis, sentience, and purposiveness are tightly entwined with our own. Our fate is not separable from theirs. Seeing things in this way—from a phenomenological and inward, and not just from a scientific and outward perspective—can help to give us a true picture of the plight that threatens our earth and all of its creatures today. It is a picture that involves and requires fellow-feeling and intimate sharing with the other creatures of earth, and not just a coldly objective, exclusively human-centered point of view. Empathetic engagement with all forms of life on earth is urgently needed and not just exclusive preoccupation with our own. Empathy requires recognition of our shared inwardness of outlooks and perspectives with other organisms, our rightly cherished common possessions of “mind in life.” The other organisms of this earth are thus not mere means to our human ends but ends in themselves, entitled as such to our utmost respect and scrupulous regard. To treat them otherwise is to exhibit a careless, distorted, imminently dangerous attitude toward the world and their necessary place in the world. To feel the struggles of an organism and, by extension, of its species, as it strives to flourish and survive in an increasingly unsupportive earthly environment, is an essential part of effective thought and action in this time of grave challenge and crisis. Unemotional, rigorously scientific reasoners may object that all we need as stimuli to effective action is proper knowledge of the external facts, but my rejoinder to this claim is that we also need profound feelings for the facts, because included in them are facts—phenomenologically and analogically discernible—about the inner lives of biological organisms of all kinds. Neither externally accessible facts nor empathetic feelings

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by themselves will suffice. The outer and the inner are essential parts of a veridical picture of living reality. Affection, fellow-feeling, and the sense of sharing from within a wondrous but in many ways precariously threatened biosphere are needed and not just information about the cold facts. We humans need to be motivated and moved in revolutionary ways, both individually and socially, not just be well instructed and informed. Justice and equity for all the creatures of earth, and not just humans, are desperately needed. Pervasive empathetic concern, not just pertinent information, is required. Our feelings, as well as our intellects, must be brought to effective and timely operation before it is too late—not just for us but sadly for other creatures of the earth, large numbers of them already direly threatened. Such feelings ought not to be merely ones of condescending pity or haughty noblesse oblige but ones of genuine kinship and community. What we owe to ourselves, we also owe to our earthly home and all of its inhabitants. We owe it to even the least of these earthly creatures, our companions in the bold adventure of life. Descriptive analyses of the inner lives of nonhuman organisms have high moral import. TWO OBJECTIONS TO THE FOREGOING ARGUMENTS I can imagine two possible objections to my emphasis on empathetic recognition of the inner lives of biological organisms and the profound importance of such recognition for responding positively and effectively to the global climate crisis. The first objection is that this emphasis is anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. It centers on the inner lives of human beings as the phenomenological model for understanding and responding to threats to the lives of other organisms. And it treats these organisms as if they, like humans, have conscious inner lives. But only humans, or so the objection goes, have anything like conscious awareness, sentience, or purpose. There is no such thing as conscious language—spoken or written—reason, tradition, or culture, among nonhuman forms of life, and to treat them as if there were amounts to flagrantly anthropocentric and anthropomorphic ways of thinking and acting. The second objection is that the position I have outlined in the previous section is rankly sentimental rather than being strictly rational. It emphasizes vague human feelings at the price of exact scientific reasoning. There is no more or less to being a nonhuman organism than what science is able to investigate and describe with its techniques of objective, external analysis, description, and explanation. What being a nonhuman organism amounts to, as far as any possibly reliable human understanding is concerned, is solely what natural science is able to tell us.

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My response to these two objections is as follows. The first objection overlooks the indispensable contribution of philosophical phenomenology to our ability to comprehend what humans as well as nonhuman organisms are like in the inside as well as on the outside, and the consequent need for scientific modes of description and explanation to be supplemented by a phenomenological approach. It also overlooks or dismisses the sophisticated arguments Evan Thompson presents in support of this supplementary approach to understanding nonhuman organisms. Finally, it fails to take into account Thompson’s and my own ready acknowledgment that not all kinds of biological organism are capable of consciousness, even though many are capable of it in varying degrees. I have outlined and supported in this chapter Thompson’s defense of phenomenology’s relevance to the study of organisms, and also of the roles of autopoeisis, sentience, and purpose in all nonhuman organisms’ responses— whether conscious or not—to their environments. The inner experiences and agential reactions of humans to their environments provide indispensable clues to similar experiences and responses of nonhuman organisms, therefore, and this does not make humans the arbiters, models, or dictators of the latter. Instead, it helps, along with other kinds of evidence, to give indispensable insight into the lives of nonhuman creatures. The second objection confuses sentimentalism with recognition of the critical cognitive role of feelings as partners with reasons in providing awareness of, knowledge of, and appropriate responses to the inner lives of nonhuman organisms. To understand that at least many nonhuman organisms have feelings such as those of wariness, pleasure, pain, loss, anxiety, expectation, hope, disappointment, and care for their own lives and those of their progeny, and that all organisms are capable of the three basic inner traits of life itself described by Thompson is not sentimentality but extremely relevant information. To argue that this information and persistent human acknowledgments of it should be important parts of ecological responsibility is far from indulging in gushing sentimentality. It is recognition of ineliminable reality about the inner lives, perspectives, and demands of organic beings and of the palpable, urgent need for active attention to this reality in our human responses to the present environmental crisis. Sentimentality should be sharply distinguished from appropriate empathetic feelings for, and reactions on the part of us humans to, the present plight of our own lives and the innumerable other organic lives on the face of the earth. The lives of all other earthly beings matter strongly and significantly to them and should matter intensely to us humans as well.

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CONCLUSION I have argued in this chapter that there is an intimate, inseparable relation between mind and world. World has no meaning apart from the reactions, responses, feelings, musings, or interpretations of mind. And mind has no status, role, or significance apart from world as its creator, resource, and sustainer. Mind and world are correlative, at least if we purport to understand world viewed from the perspective of mind and in light of the plausible assumption that there are many worlds regarded by or interacted with by innumerably distinct minds—human and nonhuman—in concourse with what function for them as these worlds. There are commonalities pervading these differences, to be sure, some of them close and others more distant in character. But claims even by the natural sciences to the contrary, there is no purely objective world wholly distinct from or separable from the workings of mind. A meaningful world is a mentally interpreted, mentally assumed, and mentally characterized world—seen from the perspective of some kind of meaning-responding and meaning-conferring mental field. The mental field can as primitive and relatively simple as with the autopoeisis, sentience, and purpose of a bacterium. It can be as relatively high-level and complex as with the mentality made possible by the intricate nervous systems and other bodily processes of chimpanzees, crows, or octopuses. Or it can have the character of human systems of feeling, thought, and attribution. The visions of worlds made possible by these capabilities, some conscious and some not so, vary widely. Consensus about the character of the supposedly one world common to us and to all other living beings may be strong among modern humans, especially those profoundly informed by the current assumptions, paradigms, theories, and outlooks of the natural sciences. But even here there are significant differences of assumption, interpretation, and understanding. Not all persons everywhere across the globe are steeped in or deeply conversant with the natural sciences, and some are actively opposed to particular or most scientific claims. And scientists may and often do disagree with one another in their construals of the most fundamental character of the world. Moreover, even the sciences as a whole undergo many changes of outlook and commitment over time—some of them radical and far-reaching. All claims to a finally definitive understanding of the true character of the world are made suspect by the lessons of the past and the uncertainties of the future. All worlds are mentally interpreted, mentally assumed worlds. There are no others. To think that I or someone else knows what the world is in and of itself beyond all interpretation or warranted disagreement, is already to bring the

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world within the orbit of my or that person’s thinking and to subject it to the assumed absolute authority of my or that person’s mind. It is true that not all conceptions of the world are equally plausible because they may differ in crucial respects and thus be inconsistent with one another in these ways. We should certainly endeavor to arrive at the most cogent, convincing picture of the world of which we are capable at any given time. But the limitations of our inescapably finite perspectives on the world must always be acknowledged and taken fundamentally into account. The world for any of us humans or for even the consensual majority of the most thoughtful and well-informed humans at any one place and time is not synonymous with the one world of all places and times. There may be such a world of abstract and well-reasoned speculation, but the fulsome, final, concrete reality of the world lies forever beyond our ken—even if there were or could be such a thing as a meaningful world totally separate or separable from our ken. To even imagine or try to conceive such a world is already to try to bring it within the orbit of our thought and imagination. The scope of world-making and world-responding is immense, as I have argued here. The world of the earthworm or cuttlefish is different from the human world, and each creature adapts and responds to the world in its own characteristic ways. There are, in a real sense, as many worlds as there are biological species. And the members of each species have their own mental faculties and capabilities that suit them for surviving and thriving within what function for them as their outer worlds or lived niches and environments. As we proceed along the levels of sophistication and complexity of these organisms, the variability of their capabilities and responses to their environments even within a given species become more pronounced. And with this variability goes a variability of interpretation of the resources, requirements, and opportunities of their environmental worlds—and thus of the assumed character of their worlds. Inner and outer are in this way inextricably entwined. There is, of course, the role of experience to be considered in framing responses to or conceptions of the world. Experience has an obdurate, pushing-back, resistant quality to it that helps to shape these responses and conceptions. And the experimental testing of hypotheses, informally in all directed inquiries, but most formally and exactly in the natural sciences, is a crucial part of seeking their confirmation or disconfirmation. In this way, the outer world makes its impressions on the inner mind. But experience has no meaning without interpretation, and interpretation is a mental phenomenon— even in the tiniest and least complex organisms, as Thompson argues. So here again, the outer and inner can be seen to be interfused and commingled. World is what it is from the perspective of some sort of mind or mental facility, and mind is what it is from the standpoint of its interactions with, positings of, and construals of some sort of world. Worlds are not made

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out of whole cloth, but neither are minds. Each is a necessary component of the other. No world of importance, meaning, or value is possible without mind, and no functioning mind is possible without world as its context, focus, and concern. Implicit in Thompson’s conception of mind in life, or the presence and operations of autopoiesis, sentience, and purposiveness in all forms of life is—I argue in this chapter—an essential aspect of the urgently needed approach to our current ecological crisis. This aspect is explicit recognition of and deep respect for the inwardness of the millions of biological creatures on the face of the earth—a recognition that takes full account of their being something other than manipulable objects to be handled, treated, and exploited solely for the entertainment or use of human beings. Their inwardness is akin to our own inwardness of mind and life and should be honored, respected, and even reverenced as such. Regarding other species and other types of biological organism in this way enjoins us to assume the Golden Rule’s application to them, as we are morally obligated to apply it to other human beings. How we apply it in particular circumstances is of course a matter requiring careful thought but applying it in some manner to all living species and their members should be a matter of deep concern. Living beings of all kinds should be seen as fellow creatures with inward needs, responses, and agential powers—creatures that devise appropriate worlds for themselves even as they generate and maintain themselves by drawing on the resources of what function as their external environments. Since they are like us in these crucial respects, they can be appreciated and responded to as deserving of the same consideration and regard we assume for ourselves and our fellow humans. All living beings and the particular environments from which they draw their life and support are entitled to recognition as parts of our household (oikos) and our kin, as participants in the immense, interdependent, diverse community of living creatures on this planet. To view nonhuman creatures in this way and to have this attitude toward them sink into our bones and be part of our habitual, deeply centered outlooks on and behaviors toward the world, would be a revolution of attitude, thought, and action that could contribute immeasurably to our sense of responsibility and ability to act in meaningful, effective ways to confront the environmental crisis. This is one of my central theses in this chapter. Is this thesis a covert kind of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism? I contend that it is not, because it adamantly refuses to see the nonhuman life-forms of earth as pliable instruments for human manipulation, profit, pleasure, or use. This idea, all too long taken for granted by many if not most of us humans, is anthropocentric and anthropomorphic because it reduces the whole of the world other than ourselves—including the whole range of its living beings—to the status, form, and dubitable value of “resources”

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entirely subservient to humans. But my thesis runs directly counter to this picture by taking strong issue with the notion that living beings are unfeeling mechanisms with no semblance of an inner life, meaning that they are totally lacking in the capacity for internal sense-making or subjective responses to the world. In keeping with Thompson’s argument, I am convinced that living beings have inner lives similar in important and morally relevant ways to our own, and that these inner lives become more similar to our own as we advance up the many-branched evolutionary tree through the immense history of its development. Our differences from the other creatures of earth are ones of degree, not of merely of kind, as Charles Darwin has taught us. This view is intentionally counter-anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. We are like other living beings in highly significant ways. We are not entitled to think of ourselves as the only creatures with inner needs, desires, feelings, fears, pleasures, pains, aspirations, hopes, disappointments, agency, or accomplishment. The breadth of such experiences is admittedly attenuated as we run down the scale from extremely complex to less-complex organisms, but versions of it reach all the way down. There is no warrant in my thesis for ignoring or running roughshod over these facts of life as seen from our contemporary scientific worldview, appropriately supplemented by focused phenomenological reasoning and analogy. These putative facts also imply the putative values of immense respect for the wondrous diversity of the inner and outer sides of all living beings. Is my thesis a warrant for a kind of sentimentalism, converting other living creatures of the earth into objects of our artificial, inauthentic, cloying commiseration and pity? Whatever likeness to us humans these creatures may exhibit, according to this second objection, our differences of ability, accomplishment, and awareness so far outweigh these likenesses as to render sentimental and unconvincing any claim to the contrary. But this complaint ignores our evolutionary origins and our late arrival on earth from a whole host of creatures increasingly similar to us in important respects over at least 3.5 billion years of evolutionary development. We cannot by sheer fiat exempt ourselves from radical interdependence and community with the other living beings of earth. This is a mistake of assumption and perception long since outmoded and one that we should by now have outgrown. It is a grievous mistake brought into glaring light by the ecological crisis of our time.

Chapter Two

Inner Lives of Humans

Do humans have a soul? A correct answer to this question depends on what is meant by the term soul. We saw in the previous chapter, by drawing on the thought of Evan Thompson, that all organisms have an inner life and that this inner life in its innumerable varieties and forms qualifies as a kind of mind by virtue of its autopoeisis, sentience, and purposiveness. We also saw that the inner lives or types and degrees of mentality of all organisms, including the human ones, are functions of matter, not something metaphysically distinct from matter or set over against it in dualistic fashion. Thus, there is neither life nor mind of any sort apart from matter. Take away matter, and you take away mind. The great bulk of matter in the universe is nonmental, but all mentality is physical. Matter without mind is routine. Mind without matter is nonexistent. While mind emerges from matter by biological evolution and is a new kind of reality on the face of the earth that the amazing potencies and potentialities of matter have made possible over billions of years of change, it continues to be a material phenomenon. The differences between humans and other organisms are not ones of kind but ones of degree, although the differences of degree are, to say the least, considerable. Phillip Blom states the point this way: The only difference between us and other animals is that Homo sapiens has a stronger ability to accelerate evolution, not only by relying on genetic adaptation but also by manipulating ideas and transforming cultural practices. Human nature may not change, but human behavior can and does. Within a few generations, we can learn to act differently, to survive in new surroundings, to plan and make strategies for a future we can anticipate and try to comprehend. (2019: 256)

These differences have enabled us, he comments, to think, plan, and act in such wide-ranging ways across our planet as to accelerate or own evolution as a species. And we have done so in a relatively short time. 31

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Science journalist Peter Brannen notes about our place as humans in the story of biological evolution, “Although the history of humanity has played in the shallows so far, time, it turns out, is deep” (2020: 77). Our species bobs on the mere surface of the depths of evolutionary time. These unfathomable depths of change and development made its recent evolutionary arrival possible. They account for its continuities of basic character as well as for its differences—the latter only of degree, not of kind, even though of admittedly extraordinary degree—when compared with the countless other species of life that preceded and aided its emergence. But do the highly evolved mental functions and capabilities of humans qualify as their having a soul? Does having a soul mean, at the very least, having a strong and persistent sense of self-awareness and self-identity? And is some kind or amount of self-awareness typical of all, or at least some of the more recent branchings of the tree of evolution? Or is it perhaps the case that only humans have a sense of self or soul? And does having a soul also mean having the capability of rational thought, as contrasted with mere instinctive responses and behaviors? Is the human soul separable from the human body? Does it survive the death of the body? If not, why not? Finally, is the human soul or self capable of genuinely, irreducibly free action and agential power? So we have several questions posed for us in this chapter. What does the term soul mean? How, if at all, does it relate to the concept of life? How does the meaning of this term relate to self-awareness or the sense of self-identity? Do all living beings have souls? Do all of them have some sense of self, however vague or attenuated that might be in particular cases? Or are souls or selves—however these two concepts are related to one another—reserved for more complex organisms relatively far along the enormous time span of evolution? Even more pointedly, are souls or the capacity for self-awareness and self-directed freedom of action—or whatever else soul might mean— characteristic only of human beings? And are only humans capable of rational analysis and actions guided by such analysis? Furthermore, why do any or all of these questions matter? What significance do they have for understanding the central theme of this book, namely, the relationship of the inner and the outer, of experience and its objects, of minds and worlds? More particularly for the principal focus of this chapter, what significance do these relationships have for understanding ourselves and our relationships with one another? We can make a start toward responding to these questions by examining two famous conceptions of the soul and deciding whether either of them is relevant to the inquiries of this chapter.

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TWO CONCEPTS OF THE SOUL: PLATO AND ARISTOTLE The concept of soul has a long history in at least the Western part of the earth. The concept’s most famous and enduring exponent was the Greek philosopher Plato in the fifth century BCE. The Greek term frequently translated as soul in English is psyche. In works such as Phaedrus and The Republic, Plato depicts the soul as separate from the body, as immortal, and as having the capability of being incarnated in many different human bodies over time. The immortal soul is the rational part of the makeup of human beings and is equipped to regulate, guide, and order the other two basic aspects of human life: the spirited part, related to courage and honor but also to such emotions as anger, and the appetitive or desiderative part, related to physical needs and desires. These other two parts are aspects of the human soul, broadly conceived, and they are ideally under the rational part’s hegemony or jurisdiction. But they are also apt to ignore its direction and to fall away from its rule. This tendency accounts for the increasing distortion of humans’ personal characters but can also goad them into misleading, corrupting, or inflicting other kinds of evil on their fellow humans. Plato, following the lead of his teacher Socrates, is an ardent defender in his Dialogues of the sovereignty of the immortal soul, which he regards as the rightful guide and ruler of human thought and behavior. In the pristine, fundamentally real sense of the term, the true soul of each person is this immortal, reincarnatable, wholly rational part of the person’s being—the person’s genuine inner, individual self, not confined to any particular human body and destined to live forever. It is no great surprise that this idea became extremely attractive later to Christian thinkers, although they did not buy into the idea that the soul is capable of being incarnated in more than one human body. As the essential, enduring, unique part of each human life, it was that part suited to live everlastingly in an entirely spiritual realm with an entirely spiritual God and God’s angels—shorn at last of all the seductions and limitations of its earlier physical body—and now, at least in some Christian versions of the idea, inhabiting a radically new, incorruptible body similar to the resurrected body of Jesus. Plato’s student Aristotle had a different, although in some ways similar, conception of the soul or psyche than that of his teacher. Plato, in at least some of his Dialogues, maintained a doctrine of ideal forms that he held to be the keys to meaning and intelligibility in all things and in the whole of human life. These forms, like Plato’s souls, are timeless and immortal, as well

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as having no essential connections with matter. Aristotle adopted one aspect of this idea of the forms but rejected another. For him, the forms are resident in particular things and not separate from them. A combination of forms constitutes the intelligibility, potentiality, and actuality of any particular thing. The human soul is the defining essence or actuality (entelecheia) of the human person. The soul is this in general but also in particular for each person. Who or what that person rightly is, is defined by the combination of forms characterizing that person. But it is critically important to distinguish between what the person essentially is from the extent to which the person may betray his or her essential being because a person not only has an essential form marking the person as a human being but a panoply of accidental, changeable, non-essential forms. These latter kinds of form can give support to the essential form or depart, sometimes radically, from it. In other words, one can aspire toward and in significant degree live up to what one essentially is as a human soul, or one can violate one’s essential nature in varying degrees. The wicked and self-destructive person does so to a radical degree and in consequence can wreak havoc on those affected by that person’s malevolent intentions, decisions, and deportments. But psyche is far more general than the character and selfhood of the human person for Aristotle. For him, psyche is the designating term for life itself in all of its types. As he puts it, psyche characterizes everything that has its principle of motion or change within itself. And all such things are material, kinds of organic or living matter with essentially defining forms as well as accidental ones, the two together constituting the type of life involved as well as the particular life. So not only is psyche inseparable from all of its specific kinds of nonhuman embodiment, it is inseparable from its human embodiments as well. There is no such thing as an independent substantial soul; there are only substantial material beings exhibiting various kinds of life or soul. I have to qualify this statement to some extent, however, because Aristotle thinks of the intellectual part of the soul (or particular type of life) as separable from matter in some sense, especially to the extent that it is capable in humans of thinking “the highly intelligible” or extremely abstract forms in their own right and thus as separable from the body in that sense, when regarded from the standpoint of high level theoria or contemplative vision. But this analysis has no bearing on the idea of personally immortal, purely spiritual souls or selves such as those endorsed by Plato and others (Aristotle 1988: III, 4, 429b, pp. 165, 167). Aristotle’s soul, then, is not some kind of independent entity that resides for a time within a human body. It is the potential and actual functioning of the body that gives it life and endows it with the character of a particular kind of life. Some lives are immobile, like plants, others are capable of

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independent motion, such as animals, still others have sensations analogous to those of humans. And humans alone have strictly rational capacities. Clearly, then, Aristotle’s work in this area, entitled in its original Greek Peri Psychēs, in Latin De Anima, and traditionally in English On the Soul, should more properly be called in English, About Life. Aristotle’s concept of the soul is, therefore, close in at least some notable respects to Evan Thompson’s conception of life (and of mind in life) itself in all of its forms, and thus to the concept of life I am defending here. Life is a trait of material bodies of diverse sorts and is inseparable from those bodies. And it is an inseparable part of the living bodies of the human species. The human soul for Aristotle, Thompson, and me is then the capabilities and operations of the human bodies that support and enable the soul as the body’s inner life and provide the distinctive potentialities of the inner life of each human being. These potentialities are made actual and externally manifest, both singly and socially, in each human’s particular modes of behavior and in the whole of humanity’s cultural creations through time—many of these actualizations salutary, supportive, and good, but others sadly destructive and evil, not only for humankind but for the earth and its creatures as a whole. Such a view need not be tied to Aristotle’s conception of essential and accidental forms. I interpret these notions here in modern guise simply as the potentialities of distinctively human lives in general that are made actual in particular ways in each human life, thus constituting the individual selves of those lives and, as such, their specific construals of and responses to what acts for them as their world. There is a bodily aspect to humans, as there is for Aristotle. And this includes all of their physical needs, desires, interests, and proclivities. But there is also an intellectual and more contemplative aspect that, at least in its typically high degree of organic development, is peculiar to humans. This aspect is analogous to Plato’s and Aristotle’s rational or intellectual part of the soul. But it lies along the continuum of evolutionary development and does not separate humans completely from other kinds of organic life. If soul is deemed to be synonymous with life, as it is for Aristotle, then all living beings by their very nature have some sort of soul. Soul is another word for Thompson’s mind by this interpretation—the inner aspect of a living being, its perspectives on, relations to, and interactions with its external world, owing to its autopoeisis, sentience, and purposiveness. In the case of humans, the soul is the individual human being’s distinctive, wholly embodied, and yet inner self. Soul and self in this manner can be regarded as having the same meaning. I will henceforth speak of the human self rather than the human soul. But whether termed soul or self, I regard the concept as essentially tied to particular human bodies, not something distinct or separable from them. What,

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then, distinguishes human selves from other forms of life and marks them as human? I shall address this question under the following headings: Awareness of World, Awareness of Self, Rational Capability, and Self-Agency. AWARENESS OF WORLD I noted in the previous chapter that conscious awareness is not only a notable proficiency of humans but is also characteristic in some degree of many, but not all, other forms of life. In the human species, however, it has reached a remarkably high level of clarity, competence, and utility. This is shown by the technological prowess of humans; their development of language, both in spoken and written forms; and their collective creations, transmissions, and transformations of human cultures—all of these factors enabling them to pass along to future generations the cultural developments and changes of past generations. In this way, humans have accelerated their biological evolution with another kind of self-directed cultural evolution, as Philipp Blom points out in my earlier reference to him. And humans have done so with increasing explicitness of conscious awareness and intent. Their technologies, languages, and cultures have given them conceptions of the external world as envisioned and fashioned from their inward perspectives—a world suited for human habitation, appropriation, appreciation, and use and, in consequence, a world—at least here on earth—bestowed with an increasingly human face. This world also has undeniable threats and dangers, and humans have brooded over them and sought ways to placate and deal with them for countless millennia. The human conception of the world to some significant extent has been of something alien and unfriendly, something to be forewarned about and protected against at all costs. But it has also been recognized to have innumerable possibilities of shelter, nourishment, support, and use, possibilities about which humans have become increasingly aware and able to take advantage of over time. Developments of agriculture and animal domestication are early examples, as are the rise of cities, new means of more efficient land and sea transportation, far-ranging trade, and consequent interactions with and ability to learn from people of different cultures. The natural environment for humans has thus been increasingly supplemented with a built environment as a new kind of expression and exploitation of the world’s possibilities, and its manifestations of beneficial use have been supplemented with ritual recognitions and enactments of the world’s terrifying but also alluring sublimity and sacredness. Various crafts and techniques, organized religion, the arts, philosophy, and, later, the natural sciences and industrialization, have added their important contributions to this emerging picture.

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With changing cultural developments have come changing conceptions of the world as seen and interpreted from human perspectives. And within particular cultures, their individual members have had different perspectives on the world from one another, partly because of their different roles within the cultures. Artisans, soldiers, rulers, priests, and peasants, for example, have tended to construe the world from the standpoints of these different roles, as well as from the standpoints of their own individual experiences. Rulers, priests, and soldiers, for example, will tend to interpret the world in ways supportive of their positions of influence and power, while those subject to their power will seek ways to interpret the world that give due notice and emphasis to their distinctive roles in society. Author and Brandeis University professor Robert Kuttner retells a marvelous old joke that makes precisely this point. A tailor from New York somehow managed to get an audience from the pope. He comes home, and his family anxiously requests him to describe what the pope is like. He replies, “He’s a 40-regular” (Kuttner 2020: 72). Pervasive commonalities of experience and interpretation will remain, of course; otherwise, there could be no intracultural communications or enduring social order. But particular parts of the society, including its individual members, will have conceptions of the world that reflect their perspectives on it. Poets, philosophers, physicists, plumbers, lawyers, teachers, architects, astronauts, biologists, barbers, construction workers, chefs, deep-sea divers, the rich, the poor, the ill-treated and the rewarded, the hungry, the sated, the young, the old, and others will instinctively attend to and prioritize aspects of the world quite differently in the course of their daily lives. The same is true of the hopeful and the skeptical, the curious and the complacent, the creative and the conforming, the courageous and the fearful, and so on. What is routinely important to the one may be hardly noticed by the other or, if noticed, be considered in a quite different manner. To these observations, we can add the obvious point that particular cultures themselves have tended to vary over time, sometimes widely, in the ways they give selective meanings and values to the world. And when different cultures clash or interact with one another in substantial ways—whether through warfare, travel, or trade—new perspectives can be added to the earlier views of the world, sometimes to the point of reorienting or submerging significant aspects of those earlier views. So in some important and not to be overlooked sense, there are as many worlds as there are internal perspectives on the external environments of human beings. Inner and outer are necessarily conjoined, and the only meaningful world is an interpreted one, as I argued in the Introduction. Humans are aware of, interpret, and understand their world (or worlds) in different ways. Beneath the dominant motifs, customs, convictions, and commitments of each cultural group are the varieties of outlook and bids for recognition and power of their subgroups and individuals within those subgroups. Interactions

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with other cultures can add new volatility to the cultural mix, and thus to the “Ways of Worldmaking,” to borrow the apt title of Nelson Goodman’s book quoted and discussed in the preceding chapter. The consciousness of human beings, to say nothing of the influential role of the subconscious, has continued throughout history to alter their conceptions of the world. The world we tend to take for granted and consciously live within in our present time of increasing global interaction and trade, as well as our rampant science and industry, is different from the world (or worlds) of ancient, medieval, and early modern times. The conscious awareness of humans is greatly abetted, we can easily surmise, by the origins and developments of both spoken and written languages. Languages give greater clarity and exactitude to one’s thought processes, thus enhancing conscious awareness of oneself and of the world beyond oneself. By naming, classifying, abstracting from, and otherwise identifying and organizing aspects of experience, language contributes immeasurably to the intelligibility and significance of those aspects. Language enables humans to preserve their thoughts, insights, and discoveries, either through recitation and memorization or by means of writing. When I have an idea that I think might be important or worth remembering, for example, I hasten to write it down. It can then provide stimulus for later reflection. Were it not written, it would all too soon be forgotten. Language provides for more exact and easy communication with others, thus giving an external, shareable character to the inner thoughts of a person. When asked by someone, “Where is the key to the back door?” I could point vaguely in the direction of some place but leave the person in a quandary. Or I could say, “It’s in the kitchen, on the left side of the stove,” thus providing a clearer and more helpful answer to the question. Philosophy and science have striven for more exact forms of thought by means of more exact kinds of language, whether couched in the form of ordinary language or in that of a more strictly theoretical sort that is designed for and suited to the inquiries at issue. But language has also been resorted to with more suggestive, indirect, artistic, symbolic forms that are meant to evoke feelings, thoughts, insights, and modes of awareness that cannot be pinned down by straightforward descriptions or explanations. It has contributed, therefore, to clarity of awareness but also to a haunting, more elusive sense of truths and values that lie beyond the thresholds of exact statement. In such ways, language has also contributed enormously to conscious awareness. In so doing, it has been a chief way of identifying and conceptualizing the world and one’s place in the world. Language has also functioned as a principal means of communicating ideas, traditions, and cultural achievements historically, thus enabling new generations to learn from and build on the past, as well as having a basis for contemplating and seeking to avoid its mistakes and failures. This is true of

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both spoken language preserved as oral tradition and written language serving the same purpose. In all of the aforementioned ways, language has become a dominant factor in consciously identifying and conceptualizing the world, giving greater clarity, order, and intelligibility to what persons come to regard as the world external to them. As a dominant means of society’s educating and enculturating the young, language has registered and preserved the principles, commitments, and values of given societies through time, as well as providing a means for rethinking and improving those principles, commitments, and values. Before leaving this section, I want to comment on the extent—sometimes minor, at other times considerable—to which individuals, with their distinctive outlooks on the world, can contribute to the outlooks of others. Many years ago, I was on a bus traveling from Washington, D. C. to New York City to defend my doctoral dissertation before its examining committee. I sat next to a young man about my own age. We fell into conversation, and he identified himself as a professional photographer. Soon he began to call attention to and exult in the play of shadows in the passing world outside the bus window. He was particularly fascinated with the shadows cast by the struts of the many bridges over which our bus traveled. I had never given particular notice to shadows and never felt a need to pay attention to them. But they were of great importance to this young photographer, an essential part of the tools of his trade. Therefore, he saw the world quite differently from the way in which I had been accustomed to seeing it or more properly, not seeing a salient aspect of it. I cite this example to illustrate in this minor but suggestive way how differently individuals can interpret and respond to the world, noticing and prioritizing aspects of it that others may never have thought about or imagined. My fellow bus rider’s everyday world was notably different from mine. He added an unforgettable aspect of his vision of the world to my own. In similar fashion, individual poets, novelists, painters, musicians, religious thinkers, philosophers, and scientists can expand and enrich our conceptions of the world with their sometimes startlingly innovative thoughts and perspectives. Once having seen Vincent van Gogh’s original painting The Starry Night or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica hanging in a museum, for example, we may no longer view, imagine, or conceive the night sky or the horrors of air warfare in the same way. Our perception of and relation to the world have undergone change. Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton’s cogitations helped to inaugurate the Age of Enlightenment, with its radically new way of understanding and relating to the world. The poems and other writings of Wolfgang von Goethe and William Wordsworth contributed greatly to the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century, altering our experiences of

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and attitudes toward nature. One could multiply such examples endlessly. Inner and outer realms act in tandem with one another. AWARENESS OF SELF Along with awareness of world goes increasing awareness of the identity of the human self as a participant in the world, but also as a separate kind of inner reality, distinct in crucial respects from the external world. To be keenly aware of oneself is to be conscious of oneself as the subject of thoughts, impulses, ideas, feelings, and various other kinds of firsthand intimation and experience. I am conscious of myself, for example, as having a subjective, phenomenological, firsthand field of awareness that is unique to me. Aspects of it can be communicated and shared with others at second and third hand, but only I can participate directly and immediately in it. My uniqueness as a person is closely tied to my uniquely accessible and inviolable self-awareness. This keenly felt self-awareness is, at least as far as we can presently tell, especially prominent in human beings and is the result of their relatively high development of conscious awareness in general. Emphasis on the singular importance and value of each person’s unique subjective awareness has grown apace in more recent times with the decline of feudalism and autocracy and the rise of more democratic and egalitarian forms of government. These developments have led to more active attention being paid to the importance and value of personal experiences and outlooks on the world. Greater freedom of thought and expression for all members of society has heightened possibilities for societal and cultural creativity. Rigid authoritarianism in at least some quarters today has given way to welcoming and encouraging expressions of individual insights, proposals, and points of view. Individual self-awareness and self-expression can be disruptive to requisite social consensus and social order and should not be allowed to run to the extreme of anarchy. But they also have the potential to keep societies abreast of their times, to provide the resilience needed to adapt to changing circumstances, and to make available to the society as a whole individual sources of creativity and imagination that might well be required to take advantage of fresh opportunities. The unique subjective awareness of each individual, when allowed to be taken seriously into account, can help to safeguard society against a stultifying uniformity, conformity, and staleness of thought and action.

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RATIONAL CAPABILITY As we saw earlier in this chapter, Plato and Aristotle make much of the rational capability of human beings and see this capability as belonging to the distinctive essence of their form of life, their soul, and their selfhood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the modern era, prominent philosophers René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and other thinkers of that era, and well into the present, have viewed rationality as the exclusive possession of humans and denied any part or degree of it to nonhuman types of life. I will have something briefly to say about Descartes and Kant in this connection as my discussion in this section proceeds. In the next chapter I shall take issue with this long dominant view, but for now I want to stress the undeniable importance of the capability of rational thought in humans, linking this capability to their consciousness, their conception of and relation to their worlds, and their sense of self. The central place allotted to philosophy as a basic discipline of thought prior to the rise of the natural sciences took for granted the character implicitly assigned it by the etymology of its name “the love of wisdom.” And the by now familiar designation of humans as Homo sapiens, the “wise” species, implies that they are members of the biological group that is most reliably and naturally—and for most of human history believed to be uniquely—capable of rational thought. How could one aspire to be wise without the capability and use of reason? Do any nonhumans have the capability of reason, at least to some degree? Descartes argued in the Fifth Section of his Discourse on Method that nonhuman forms of life “have no reason at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, just as a clock, which is only composed of wheels and weights is able to tell the hours and measure time more correctly than we can do with all our wisdom” (1967: I, 117). For him, nonhuman beings cannot be rational because they do not have the faculty of speech, which is reserved for humans. Most fundamentally, they do not have rational souls or selves, which only human beings do. Even the physical bodies of humans, according to Descartes, are machines similar to the machines of nonhuman organic bodies. Only in the separate human self is there capacity for rational thought or action. It is also the case for Descartes that only humans are conscious. Nonhuman beings are incapable even of experiencing pleasure or pain. It follows from his analysis that we should feel free to do anything we wish to nonhuman creatures. The Golden Rule applies only to humans; we have no moral obligation to animals. Our sole obligation is to other human beings because only humans have rational selves or souls. Moral considerability is restricted to us humans in our relations as humans with one another.

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Kant, for his part, argued that only humans are capable of rational thought and action. The profound rational analyses of both his Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals would not have been possible for any type of nonhuman creature, he reasons, especially since these analyses rested on synthetic a priori principles that would be discoverable and discernible only by extremely thoughtful, intellectually resourceful humans like himself. The kind of ethical thought and manner of life outlined in the second work mentioned above turns critically on recognition that humans are capable both of autonomously legislating and of being so legislated by fundamental moral principles such as the universality of all genuinely ethical principles, as well as acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity and value of each and every human being, regarded as a rational being. Viewed in this way, nonhuman creatures lie outside the pale of ethical consideration. Kant writes that nonhuman creatures have “only a relative value as means and are consequently called things.” Humans, as rational beings, “are called persons because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves—that is, as something that ought not to be used merely as a means” (1956: 96). Thus only rational beings qualify for such consideration, and only humans are rational beings for Kant. It is notable that, for him, rationality and non-rationality are absolute categories. There are no degrees of rationality, however slight or large, to be accorded to nonhumans. Therefore, Kant saw nonhuman creatures as having importance and value for human beings only for their instrumental character, their usefulness for human projects and needs. These creatures have no inherent value that demands moral treatment or regard. Here he joins hands with Descartes. Together, they articulate in philosophical form an exploitative approach to nature as a whole that lay behind the industrial revolution and sadly marks our own anthropogenic time. This attitude toward our fellow creatures is neither rational nor wise. I reserve critique of it for the chapter to follow. However, the role of human rationality in framing human conceptions of the external world is certainly a prominent one, and this is the principal point I have sought to make in this section. Rationality and the agential freedom of human beings are closely conjoined, as I argue in the next section. SELF-AGENCY There could be no such thing as rationality without agency. Freedom of thought is inseparable from rationality of thought, that is, the requisite freedom to question, to analyze, to pose alternative hypotheses for the reasoning self, and to begin to test the truth or falsity of those hypotheses. An intentional argument to the effect that freedom itself does not exist, despite the wide

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prevalence of such arguments among thinkers today as well as frequently in the past, would therefore not only be deeply puzzling but self-contradictory. How could we freely seek to defend such a proposition without implicitly denying it? It would seem by all odds to be true that rationality and freedom are linked together. If rationality is possible, freedom must be real. If humans or any other species of life are capable of rationality to any degree, they must also be free to a corresponding degree. Can someone do or think anything rightly branded as rational without that person knowing why it is rational? Yes, but this is not the same thing as being intentionally able to examine and defend the rationality of one’s thoughts and actions, or to take conscious reasonable issue with other kinds of thought or action. A rational being is one capable of freely directed critical inquiry into the putative rationality of courses of thought or action. To have rational power is also to have agential power. To be a rational self is also to be a free self. The denial of personal freedom is, I believe, connected with stubborn insistence on an exclusively external approach to describing and explaining various aspects of the live of human organisms. The unique privacy and intimacy of individual human awareness is intentionally set aside as being unknowable by, and therefore as being unimportant for external analysis. The experiences of the individual self, amenable to phenomenological portrayal, analogy, and understanding, are not in their firsthand character and detail available for techniques of external and putatively “objective” study. The conclusion often drawn from this fact is denial that there is such a thing as the active self, and most particularly for the topic here, rejection of the idea that such a self can be regarded as a genuinely free agent—free in the sense that, the causal conditions remaining the same, alternative decisions and enactments within that causal context are routinely possible for it. Moreover, whatever cannot be subjected to a strictly causal analysis and explanation is deemed to be, for purposes of description and explanation, unreal. Reducing human freedom to a strictly causal analysis is already to deny its reality because a particular suite of causes is assumed to allow, ex hypothesi, for only one outcome or effect. And setting aside the personal, really active “I,” with its privacy, immediacy, and inaccessibility to direct public investigation or scrutiny, is necessarily to cordon off an essential and arguably the most essential part of what it means to be an individual human being. I do not mean to denigrate the need for external causal approaches to human capabilities and behaviors. I mean only to insist that they be supplemented with approaches that take into account the reality of the inner lives and capabilities of human beings as well. There is an inner life of humans like that of all organisms, and in the case of humans—if not in that of at least some other kinds of organism as well—there is the factor of firsthand

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consciousness, individual self-awareness, identification of alternatives for choice and action, as assumption of the self’s capability for consciously free selection of one of the alternatives. If rational inquiry is possible within any domain of thought, including that of scientific thought, I argue that the assumption of personal freedom must hold true. For allegedly reasonable rejections of the reality of the inner self’s agential power, as argued for by a respected psychologist and two prominent neuroscientists, I refer the reader to Crosby 2017: 89–98. In these pages, there is critical discussion and disagreement with each of the three thinkers in this regard. The psychologist is Daniel M. Wegner, and the two neuroscientists are Michael S. Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio. The titles of their books discussed there are listed in the Bibliography section of the present book. It is ironic to me that these thinkers reason with thoughtful, deliberate care and in considerable detail—all the while appearing to make significant choices among alternative possibilities—for the claim that there is no such thing as an inner self having genuine freedom of decision or action. They opt for and rationally defend in their respective books the bold thesis that it is never the effective free acts of inwardly experienced personal selves but only the causally determined operations of the externally observable body in its interactions with the world, that account for the sum total of human actions. If human freedom cannot be counted as real in the sense of not being totally controlled by the causal circumstances or conditions within which it admittedly operates, how could these three scholars have painstakingly researched and written, and how could we now be able to read and critically assess, what give all evidence of the books reasoned and authored by them? They brand as illusory a competence they would seem incapable of accomplishing without the constant use of. Machines may be able automatically and unthinkingly to produce what may at first glance look like books, but unless they have at some point been programmed by self-conscious, freely acting human beings, we are entitled to respond to them as blind, thoughtless mechanical operations lacking significant human input and persuasive human character. It is surely an important fact, moreover, that we humans are not willing to organize our lives around or to commit them solely to the neurons of our brains, the digestive processes of our stomachs, or the DNA molecules of our cells. There is more to each person’s everyday life than the externally observable material conditions that underlie and make possible the person’s life. Are these three writers content to be regarded as machines rather than as free, agential selves? The question might look like an ad hominem attack on their positions, but it poses what I regard as a serious issue. I do not impugn the honesty or integrity of these authors. They have contributed a great deal to our understanding of human beings and their behaviors. What I call into question is the consistency, and thus the convincingness, or their analysis and

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of all analyses of this type. I do not see how any human being can consistently reason to the conclusion that all such agentially free reasoning on the part of humans is impossible. The three authors propose an alternative for reasonable choice and seem to do in the spirit of responsible free inquiry, but in doing so they also deny themselves the freedom either to choose such an alternative from among other possible interpretations and also deny for their readers the freedom to consider their proposal’s merits as possible interpretations, among others. They themselves are by their own admission causally impelled to believe that genuine—could have done otherwise, the causal conditions remaining the same—freedom is impossible because efficient causal circumstances drive them inescapably to this conclusion. And those of their readers who are either convinced or unconvinced by their arguments are by implication in exactly the same position. All of them without exception are captives, according to the same arguments, of their respective causal determinations at any given time and at all times. What does education become in the absence of genuine freedom as characterized above? The answer would seem to be some kind of operant conditioning—manipulations of the mind by external forces imposed by social groups, the social impositions themselves being the irresistible consequences of earlier conditioning, and ultimately of factors favorable to evolutionary adaptation.­The familiar idea of effective education as awakening the spirit of genuinely free personal curiosity and inquiry must be abandoned. It is all a matter of coming to have the “right” thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes, as determined by social authorities. Education and indoctrination are therefore indistinguishable. The idea of education as a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas is an illusion. The conception of the individual mind as a citadel of intellectual responsibility whose personal rationality and dignity should be respected and defended at all costs must be abandoned. And how should we think of moral responsibility? Social punishment and reward must be understood to account entirely for the presence or absence of moral character and behavior in individual humans—either that or some kind of mental illness in cases of particular kinds of aberrant character and behavior. Personal guilt, as the result of wrong personal “choices,” must now be seen a matter of personal bad luck. And personal virtue must be interpreted as the outcome, not of genuine freedom of choice among available alternatives, but just of good luck. All such putative answers, however, must themselves be regarded, not as the outcome of choices guided by a requisite freedom of rational inquiry, but as the results of causal factors beyond the awareness or control of those who reason—or give the appearance of reasoning—in these ways. The inner lives of human beings have, in these scenarios, become wholly controlled by outwardly detectable causes. Actions that may ordinarily

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have been regarded as stemming from personal freedom and responsibility must now be viewed as pawns of forces beyond personal control. Where does the buck stop? It gets lost in an infinite regress of prior causes. The inner lives of human beings, with their seeming freedom of thought and action, are left by the wayside because they are denied any role as the principal initiating sources of any human actions. All reliable descriptions and explanations are reserved for what can be achieved by techniques of investigation and analysis of what are claimed to be externally accessible, entirely controlling causes. In the meantime and paradoxically, it is particular human persons acting as champions of causal determinism, including the three authors mentioned above, who present—despite having to draw on their own inner consciousness, active reasoning, and informed choices in order to do so—what they claim to be convincing reasons for defending a deterministic account of any and all human choices. In consequence, the human self is relegated to the status of an idler wheel, bystander, or helpless onlooker of its inward life instead of being able to function as its active agent. Such relegation overlooks the whole body’s capability of thought and action. It is utilization by the material body of its other causal conditions in order to be a self-directing cause in its own right. It is conscious inwardness directed toward inward and outward change. The self can work to change its outlooks and to change its behaviors. It has irreducible, irreplaceable, real agential power. Is the human self truly free? Our readiness to raise this crucial question and to assume our ability to seek for a reasonable answer to it is already to acknowledge the self’s freedom—its capability of goal-directed, purposive, or teleological action in the context of the body’s and the environment’s efficient causal conditions. In both body and environment, there are aspects of openness and alterability rather than systems rigorously determined by causal conditions. These conditions contextualize and limit but do not totally control acts of individual freedom. There is thus ample room for free actions. Inward self-consciousness is accompanied, augmented, and supported by acute consciousness of personal freedom. A posited conception of consciousness without freedom is a pale simulacrum of its true nature. CONCLUSION I have argued in this chapter that the soul or self of a human being is a function of the human body, not something separate or separable from the body. Ensouled beings are material beings. And I have contended that the human self differs only in degree, not in kind, from the minds or inward lives of other organisms, with their autopoeisis, sensitivity, and purposiveness. I have

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looked briefly at the concepts of soul in the thought of Plato and Aristotle and concluded that my own conception of the self resembles more closely the outlook of Aristotle rather than that of Plato. In particular, I have endorsed Aristotle’s notion that the rational self or soul is a function of the body rather than an immaterial something inhabiting it. I have also briefly examined the ideas of the rational self promulgated by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant and taken issue with Descartes’s mind-body dualism and Kant’s contention that only humans are capable of rational thought and therefore that only they deserve moral consideration and treatment. With regard to the topic of conscious awareness, I have defended the view that it is not confined to humans but possessed in at least some degree by many other kinds of life. In the case of humans, it is greatly enhanced by their technological abilities, their spoken and written languages, and their elaborate cultural and technological creations. With these developments have come ever changing conceptions of and perspectives on the world that, when shared with others, can enhance and expand visions of the world previously assumed by these others. The human consciousness of self and awareness of the uniqueness and value of individual selves has grown over time, aided by the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph as well as by changes in social and political systems and attitudes. The ability to value one’s individual life for its own sake and to have it valued by others for its uniqueness and importance is a commendable feature of these factors—even though this ability still varies from culture to culture, political system to political system, and person to person. Where it is prominent, it contributes in incalculable ways to the creativity and moral sensibility of cultures. I have also argued at some length for the idea that there can be no such thing as human rationality without genuine human freedom, and that it makes no sense to think oneself capable of arguing for or against any position, including one that rejects the very existence of freedom in favor of a deterministic portrayal of human agency, without presupposing the reality of human freedom. When the possibility of genuine freedom is denied, education becomes indoctrination. Reasoning becomes a delusion. And a plausible understanding of personal responsibility is ruled out of court. The inner lives of humans become mere observers of processes and actions that are beyond their agential control. Such sad and non-palatable consequences are avoidable only when we accept and defend a robust conception of human freedom and thus of the inner lives of humans as they interact with the externally observable aspects of the human body and its environing world. The self as an agent cause is able in this way to interact with other causal factors and conditions to allow for ongoing developments in human knowledge and awareness, and for the

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necessary engagements of the inner and outer realms of human lives, outlooks, and experiences with one another. Worlds are made and selves are made in coordination with one another. This is possible only if selves are free to question, inquire, and seek for rationally defensible results. Are the topics brought to the fore and discussed in this chapter of only relatively minor importance and value? I submit to the contrary that they are topics of outstanding importance and value that should in no way be downplayed or minimized. Life on earth is not an uninterrupted vale of tears. It is a scene of aching wonder and beauty, offering incalculable opportunities for inspiration and joy. But what about the importance of purely spiritual realms and beings, and of human prospects for everlasting life, free at last of the seductions, limitations, perils, and sorrows of mortal flesh? Do these not rank on a much higher tier than the exclusively this-worldly concerns of this chapter? They emphatically do not for me because I do not denigrate matter, the material world, or the material human body. For me, matter creates and makes possible the human self, which has no prospect of existing apart from it. All that exists, in my view, is some form of matter-energy, at least so long as appropriate recognition is given to a conception of matter that accords full recognition to the stupendous potentialities for growth, change, and development that its 13.8 billion-year history amply demonstrate—potentialities for the emergence of new types of existence, including those of the multitudinous forms of vibrant life and mind here on earth, and the lives, minds, experiences, aspirations, and achievements of our own species. The sorrows, failures, and atrocities of humans should not be minimized or forgotten. Life on earth is not paradise for those who experience extreme congenital or later disabilities, deprivations, addictions, and pains, or for those who die prematurely. Nor is it such for those who weep bitter tears for the suffering and loss of loved ones—all too often at the hands of malicious, murderous, or warring humans. These experiences are lamentable parts of the human condition, of what it means to be finite and material, and to live in the midst of other fallible human beings. No other mode of existence is available to us, at least not in the conception of ourselves and the world that I have explored, depicted, explained, and shared in this chapter. But the inestimable gifts of human existence and its prospects for brighter, more humane, and more just futures should also not be ignored. It is within our power to better the course of our lives as individuals and societies, and to care much more compassionately and comprehensively for the future of the nonhuman living and nonliving natural world here on earth than we have to date—a world of which we humans are a fortunate, integral, and responsible part. These themes are matters of extreme and enduring importance for us all—human and nonhuman alike.

Chapter Three

Conscious Self-Awareness in Other Animals

My wife Pam and I have a male cat named Welby. Or perhaps he has us. Which side of the relationship is owner, and which is owned is not always clear. We love our cat, and we presume that he loves us. He has neither spoken nor written language with which to inform us, but he has developed a range of symbols that he regularly uses to communicate with us. For example, he rubs against our legs when he wants something, such as being petted or being allowed to go out onto the screen porch. He will also place himself by the porch door to request that it be opened for him to go out or come in. When Pam or I come into the house from outside or from a trip in the car, he positions himself eagerly on a stool by the kitchen because he expects a few dry treat pellets from the jar on the refrigerator. When strange people come into the house, such as plumbers or construction workers, he hides underneath the bed until they are gone. He also flees to this hiding place if there is a thunderclap, heavy rain, a leaf blower running on the roof, or some other loud noise. If someone accidentally steps on his tail, he yelps. He sidles up to the water faucet in the bathtub requesting that it be turned on with a gentle trickle so that he can stand on the side of the tub and lap the trickle with his tongue. We infer from these and other familiar signals that he wants affection, that he wants to go out to the porch or to come in from it, that he desires a treat, that he is fearful or at least uncomfortable with strange people in the house or when hearing loud noises, that he has experienced sudden pain, or that he enjoys sipping the water from the faucet. In these familiar behavioral ways, he puts us in touch with—or gives every evidence of doing so—his inner life. Is Welby conscious, or does he just seem to be so? Pam and I do not hesitate to give a positive answer to the question, considering the indications to this effect I have mentioned here. But of course we are not experts in this field of inquiry. 49

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We saw earlier in this book that all forms of life, according to Evan Thompson, have the inwardness of mind. I agree with his view that every last one of these creatures, including even bacteria, have what he describes as the three defining traits of mind, namely, autopoeisis, sentience, and purposiveness, and that these traits enable them to interact from within themselves with what function as their particular external environments or worlds. But we also saw that, despite their possessions of some form of mind, not all living beings can be described as having conscious minds. But are any nonhuman living creatures really conscious? Is our cat Welby, for example, conscious or does he only give an appearance of being so to humans all too ready to attribute anthropomorphic traits and capacities to other creatures? I do not seek to answer here the question concerning the full range of consciousness among living beings in the comprehensive depth and detail it would require. I do not have the special training, experience, or competence to do so. But it is not critical to my task in this book to be able to carry out such a massive task. What I plan instead to do in this chapter is to discuss three examples of nonhuman life that three specialists have shown convincingly to be conscious to at least some significant degree. These examples at least answer in the negative the question of whether consciousness is restricted to humans by exhibiting its possession by at least three other forms of life. The three examples are octopuses, sperm whales, and corvids or crows. But before turning to these examples, I want to indicate what I have in mind when I use the term consciousness in its applications to human beings. I can then make use of this conception as a frame of reference in talking about consciousness in nonhuman kinds of life. HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS Consciousness in humans consists of sensations, conceptions, imaginings, moods, desires, recollections, anticipations, hopes, disappointments, fears, sorrows, joys, pains, pleasures, and other kinds of private experiences unique to a particular self. It also includes unique subjective awareness of one’s environment and of one’s interpretations of and interactions with that environment. Consciousness is a continuously unfolding flow of awareness rather than a series of disconnected episodes, and it functions as the continuing background of such episodes whenever these occur. An isolated flash of light or single pang of pain, for example, does not count as a moment of conscious awareness when there is no prolongation of such moments or no persisting memory of them over at least a limited stretch of time. Rational inquiry and actions based on it are also notable traits or capabilities of human consciousness. And these require, as I noted in chapter 1,

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consciously assumed, genuinely available freedom of thought and action. To act consciously is to act intentionally, and when an action is directed toward a human’s environment, it is accompanied with usually justified expectation of the intended effects on the external environment. The same is true when one’s action is directed toward some aspect of one’s inner outlooks or states. One can intentionally seek to change one’s mind or to reexamine and alter one’s feelings, for example. Consciousness thus includes awareness of oneself thinking, feeling, and acting, or what can be called meta-consciousness. I know that I am now thinking about the phenomenon of human consciousness, for example, and striving for a succinct, satisfying, general description of its nature. Human consciousness includes not only experiences of reflective thinking or feeling but also what Thompson calls acts of “skillful coping” or “immersed skillful action,” where there is no “detached observation or reflective self-awareness, but rather a nonreflective attunement to the interplay of action and milieu” (2007: 314). Are we conscious in our dreams? I contend that we are to the extent that we can recollect experiences of our dreams and in that way attest to our consciousness of them while dreaming. Only in dreamless sleep is consciousness entirely absent. In brief, then, consciousness is a subject’s unique, firsthand, inner experiences of various sorts and the interpretive engagements of these experiences with aspects of the subject’s outer environment or world. The physiological possibility of an organism’s consciousness seems also to be critically dependent on complex kinds of neurological system and a rather large ratio of brain size to body size, as is indicated by relevant studies of animal structure and behavior. Resemblances or approximations to this description of consciousness in species of nonhuman animals or other types of organism qualify as indicating their particular types or degrees of consciousness. For example, behavioral indication of an organism’s experience of pain over a period of time, and not just as an instantaneous cringe or wince, can be construed as its consciousness of pain, and not just as an unconscious response to a stimulus. Does the organism keep attending to a site of apparent pain by protecting it, tenderly massaging it, or ministering to it in some fashion? If so, it would seem to be consciously aware of its pain. More than a momentary reaction is involved. Even the most complex and highly developed nonhuman organisms do not seem to have anything approaching the sophistication and precision of language that humans do, although the sperm whales I shall soon discuss have been found to have a relatively impressive symbolic system of interaction with one another, other creatures, and their respective environments. But do they talk within or to themselves as we humans commonly do? Humans’ possession and use of language is a critical key, as I argued in the previous

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chapter, to the detailed, vivid, reflective consciousness and capability of rational thought and analysis typical of their species. So are at least some animals capable of thinking about their thinking, conscious of their own conscious states, aware of themselves as such, when acting as they act? And if so, how vivid and commonplace is such self-consciousness in them? Thompson tells us—and I have agreed with him—that all life-forms have the capability of sentience or sense-making in their relations to their environments. But do any of them have similar perceptions of their own selfhood as involved in their sentient relations to their worlds? Is their inwardness ever conscious of itself as having an inward being with inwardly discerned importance and value? More pointedly, would not the more highly developed of these life-forms be more likely to survive by having some sense of themselves as threatened or in need, and in that manner looking out consciously for their own self-interest? And is it not likely that conscious conceptions of inner selves and conscious conceptions of outer environments would develop together? In this event, the two should be seen as not only correlative but also as contrastive—neither being clearly delineated or definable apart from the other. What I have in mind in raising these last questions and observations is the issue of whether or not consciousness always involves self-consciousness and an accompanying and contrastive world-consciousness to at least some degree. And if not, what would the adaptive or survival value of consciousness amount to? There is, after all, a sharp difference between an automatic reaction to a stimulus of some sort and a consciously selected one, no matter how pronounced or attenuated the level of consciousness might be interpreted to be. Here we see once again the close connection of consciousness, however minimal it might be, with freedom of thought and action, however minimal it might be. Were there no need for conscious choices on the part of an organism, so far as its survival is concerned, operant conditioned responses or behavioral modifications would be all that is ever required. Both consciousness and freedom then become superfluous, leaving us with no satisfactory evolutionary explanation for their emergence. Let us keep these questions and observations about the nature and scope of consciousness in mind as we attend to the three animal species I shall now begin to discuss. I do so in order to show that conscious is not the sole possession of human beings but is also present to a considerable degree in at least some, and probably many, other life-forms. I could have decided to discuss more familiar land animals such as chimps, horses, dogs, or cats, but I have chosen two creatures of the sea and one of the air for this purpose. The first sea creature is one of the cephalopods, the octopus, and the second, a cetacean mammal, the sperm whale. The third example is a member of the aves class of flying animals, the crow. The remarkable differences among

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these three types of animal is especially relevant for my attempt to illustrate the probable wide range of at least some degree of consciousness among the nonhuman creatures of the earth. In each of these three, in particular, there is evidence of a relatively high level of consciousness, as my discussion is intended to show. I turn first to the octopuses. OCTOPUSES In this section I will be relying on an intriguing, well-reasoned, and well-researched book by a philosopher of science and philosopher of mind— also a scuba diver and published underwater observer and photographer of octopus life and behavior—named Peter Godfrey-Smith. The book is entitled Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Early in this book, the author makes a comment that is highly germane to the focus of the present book. He writes, ”There are two sides to the world that have to fit together somehow, but do not fit together in a way that we presently understand. One is the experience of sensations and other mental processes that are felt by an agent; the other is the world of biology, chemistry, and physics” (2016: 13–14). His book addresses throughout the inner life and awareness of octopuses, with less extensive references to the lives of cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus—other species of cephalopods—and shows how this inner life is related to the organisms’ outer environments. The cephalopods have the most highly developed nervous systems of all invertebrates, so the octopus is an excellent focus for inquiring into the extent to which consciousness is present in animals other than human animals. The octopus brain is quite large relative to its body size, a fact that shows the octopus to be similar in this respect to humans. But its nervous system is not as centrally oriented or directed toward the brain as is the case with humans and other vertebrate species. Instead, a considerable amount of its system is distributed in the eight tentacles that extend from its head—hence, its classification as cephalopod, meaning “foot" (pod) extending from “head” (kephale). An evolutionary precursor had a single foot that later became a set of tentacles—eight for the octopus and ten for cuttlefish and squid. These tentacles are rich with neurons and have suckers equipped for attaching tightly to things. The tentacles are thus capable on their own of sensing the presence of other organisms or objects and engaging them in this manner, thus not needing on every occasion to send neuronal signals back to the brain in order to do so. The octopus’s large brain and distributed nervous system are accompanied by a large round eye similar in its operations to the human eye. This eye is capable of determining such things as an object’s shape, size, distance, and

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character, not only transmitting to the octopus brain visual signals transmitted by the object but also providing in this way for interpretation of the import of these signals with a high degree of accuracy. These interpreted data can then be coordinated with the delicate and relatively independent sensing, feeling, touching, tasting, exploring, and gripping ability of the tentacles to provide informative assessment of and practical engagement with the octopus’s environment. Furthermore, the octopus’s observed ability to wander far from its den and to do so by differing circuitous routes but returning without fail to its starting place, shows that it has a reliable and readily accessible memory. Godfrey-Smith recounts a story about how an octopus in a laboratory tank recognized and remembered a particular lab researcher, so disliking her, it would seem, that every time she entered the lab and neared the tank, it squirted gallons of the water from the tank on her, drenching her each time in the process. It was able to do so even though all of the lab workers always wore identical kinds of clothing. Eye, brain, tentacles, and memory thus combine in order to give the octopus an integrated, continuous feeling for and apprehension of its world and of itself in relation to this world. These types of awareness also combine to give the octopus competent ways of interacting and coping with its world. They enable it, for example, to protect itself from predators and to be successful in necessary acts of den devising, foraging, and predation. They make it capable of detecting and then escaping from its adversaries with the jet propulsion provided by its siphon, the camouflaging effect of its outpourings of ink, and the radical shrinking and hiding of its protean body, devoid of skeleton or shell. The octopus can also confront and seek to intimidate adversaries or competitors for mates by swelling its pliant body into large and fearsome shapes. Octopuses are apparently slow learners, but once having learned something, they become very good at it. According to Godfrey-Smith, for example, a giant Pacific octopus learned—with some help from a human trainer who partially smashed a clam in its presence, thereby revealing the clam’s character as a source of food—to open the extremely tight-shut shells of clams by tugging at them, chipping at them with its beak, and trying to manipulate them with its tentacles in various ways. The octopus finally succeeded in learning how with sheer brute force to separate the two halves of the clam shells and was subsequently able to open them routinely and to sup on the food within. Octopuses have also learned to remove the screw caps of jars for food. Godfrey-Smith tells how it took some other octopuses a while to learn how to douse the lab lights with squirts of water from their tank, but once having learned how to perform this feat, they did it with ease. Octopuses also learned mischievously how to raise the water in their tank by inserting a tentacle into the outflow valve of the tank. This of course had the effect

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eventually of flooding the lab! Learning presupposes alert investigation, assessment, and memory, and these examples evidence such abilities. Another octopus, when repeatably given squid instead of crab, its favorite food, finally moved to the outflow valve and dumped the piece of squid into it, all the while being careful to keep the lab attendant watching its progress—a seeming act of deliberate protest. Octopuses seem to be curious about strange or novel objects in their vicinity, investigating them, dragging them to their dens, apparently interested in exploring their nature and function or just using them as objects of play. Godfrey-Smith’s underwater cameras, positioned to record the activities of octopuses in their underwater dens when divers were not present, sometimes became the misplaced objects of the octopuses’ curiosity and play. Octopuses have also been shown to play with empty pill bottles placed in their tanks, blowing them back and forth with their jets and bouncing them off the flowing water of the intake valve. A final example of shrewd octopus behavior involved small octopuses taking two halves of a coconut that had been dumped into the sea and converting them into a house, positioning themselves in one of the halves and drawing the other half over themselves. This is an example of a kind of tool making, a topic we will take up again in the section on the behaviors of crows. It is also an example of what, in humans, would be called imagination, a kind of conscious perceiving of a possibility and then proceeding to put it into practice. All of the above examples of octopus behavior are contained in Godfrey-Smith’s fascinating book, and I am fortunate to be able to cite them in this chapter. What they all show is a notably high level of intelligence and awareness in the octopus species. What makes this intelligence and awareness possible for them is a large brain and sophisticated nervous system, together with other aspects of the octopus body. Has Godfrey-Smith’s or my summation of some of the themes in his book shown that octopuses are conscious? We must remember that there are various levels of consciousness in different types of biological organism in which there seem to be evidences of its operations and presence at least to some degree. Godfrey-Smith emphasizes throughout his book that this gradational view of consciousness across the relevant spectrum of evolutionary species is in fact the case, and his is a view that I share. Because of their lack of human language and other highly developed semiotic systems such as those of logic and mathematics, octopuses are probably not capable of the meta-consciousness or the “thinking on thinking” character that is so prominent in humans and helps to account for humans’ ability to engage in focused, sustained, and intentionally rational modes of thought. But consciousness itself should not be regarded as dependent on this particular capability, or at least not with the character and extent to which it exists in humans. There is no absolute, single breaking point between consciousness

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and nonconsciousness—only varying degrees of its presence in different forms of life. The octopus appears to have consciousness to a significant degree, given the descriptions and examples in this section and the discussions throughout Godfrey-Smith’s book. I think that we should give the octopus the benefit of the doubt in this regard—especially in light of the fact that no other explanation of its singular abilities works nearly as well. Its diverse outward behaviors, along with its large brain and complex nervous system, provide convincing evidence of an active inner life. Octopuses are not notably social beings. They carry on most of their activities alone, and their mating rituals are mostly conflicts with competing males. Once a male gives his sperm to a female out of a packet located on one of his tentacles, he does not relate to her any further and takes no interest in her future progeny. The female tucks the sperm in her body, storing it in order to fertilize her eggs later. In contrast, sperm whales are intensely social, as we shall see in the next section. SPERM WHALES My discussion of sperm whales is based on a book by the world-traveling naturalist and author Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. The first of three major sections of his book concerns Safina’s interactions with sperm whales in the Caribbean Sea south of the island of Dominica over a span of time. This part of his book is my focus here. Safina recounts his observations of the lives of the whales beneath and on the surface of the sea with the tutelage of a winsomely ardent and deeply empathetic student of sperm whale behavior named Shane Gero. Gero has devoted years of his life to making use of sonar devices to detect and analyze the activities of sperm whales by tapping into their clicking system of auditory communication with one another and into their echolocations of prey—more often than not squid of different sizes—when the whales have routinely descended many thousands of feet into the dark depths of the sea. With this technique, as well as his innumerable observations of whale behavior on the surface, Gero has learned to identify particular whales. Their families, and their clans (distinctive groups of families), often giving evocative names to the individuals and groups. Safina describes how he has learned from Gero how to hear and interpret the clicking codas of sperm whale communications and prey detections when beneath the sea, as well as spending a considerable amount of time with him observing the whales’ activities and interactions with one another on its surface.

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I shall discuss five aspects of the sperm whales’ behavior in order to provide what for Safina and Gero constitutes formidable evidence of the conscious inwardness of their lives—evidence I also find to be plausible and compelling. These aspects are as follows: the whales’ astoundingly complex and provocatively exact system of communication with one another; their detailed, discriminatory labeling and recognition of individuals, families, and clans of their species by means of this system; their extremely active social life and its crucial significance for their flourishing and survival; the supreme importance of their cultural developments and of the transmission through the generations of these developments by continuing to teach them to their young; and their possession of detailed, long-term memories as additional indication of their intensely alert conscious lives. I shall draw on Safina’s descriptions of the sperm whales’ life and character in discussing these matters. The sperm whale head is massive, taking up about a third of the length of its body. The head is capable, among other things, of producing extremely loud vibrations or clicks by means of air forced through sound-amplifying lipids in a fatty organ that takes up most of the upper part of its head. The lower jaw of the whale is also fat-filled. It funnels vibrations received from without into ears filled with fluid. These vibrations are converted by the brain into sound. This ability to produce and receive vibrations gives the whales their means of communicating with one another and their means of detecting prey by emitting sonar pulses that bounce off of and detect the presence and nature of the prey. The ocean water transmits these vibrations much more effectively than they could be carried in the air, with the result that sperm whales can hear them over long distances, enabling them to communicate with one another over these distances. They have developed a complex acoustical language in order to do so in finely calibrated ways. There are distinct patterns of clicks (e.g., their numbers, sequences, lengths, relative rates, and intensities) for precisely identifying individual sperm whales, the particular families of whales, and clans or specific groups of families, as well as for communications of many other kinds of information. These communication and identification systems admit of intentional modification and development over the years and are analogous in this and other ways to human languages. They are a means that the whales have of talking with one another, enjoying one another’s company, warning one another of dangers, teaching tested and established strategies of flourishing and survival, and the like. The whales’ system of communication by means of clicks is a kind of Morse code, but without an alphabet. It is much more subtle and elaborate in its character. The ability to communicate with one another by means of such a system is supplemented by the ability to discern, with sonar clicks or a kind of acoustical “seeing,” the presence and character of potential prey in the dark depths of

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the sea, thus providing the whales’ essential source of food. The adult whales spend about fifty minutes of every hour traveling under water or descending into the ocean depths in order to forage for food, surfacing typically for about ten minutes of the hour to blow out old air and take in new oxygenated air and store it mainly in their muscles before they descend again. The sperm whale’s original nature as a land mammal who later became a creature of the sea is apparent by its possession of lungs and inability to process oxygen from the water by means of gills. The oxygen it accesses directly from the air is stored principally in its muscles because its lungs would soon collapse due to the enormous pressure at great depths produced by the weight of the water above. Whale babies are not yet capable of descents into these depths. They remain on the surface while their mothers hunt for food below, but mothers and babies remain in communication with one another by means of the language of clicks. Other adults in the vicinity can also rush to protect a baby if it or the mother emits a signal of danger concerning it. The babies are nourished by the mother’s milk, and they can nurse for four or five years, or even longer before being weened. The young males stay with their families for ten to fourteen years but are then somehow isolated from their families, perhaps being banished by their mothers on the arrival of new and more helpless and dependent progeny, thus left to roam widely across the oceans in all-male groups thereafter. These males begin to mate only ten to fifteen years later, announcing their availability for breeding with loud clangs and interacting with females of various clans. After doing so, they, like octopuses, pay no attention to their progeny, leaving them to be reared by their mothers, assisted by others in the family. Males thus transcend family and clan groups in their mating practices, even while still having clearly designated membership for life as clearly demarcated individual members of particular families and clans. The fact allows for more salutary mixing of genes than would be possible if there were only mating within the males’ families and clans of origin, as Safina duly observes. Their unique demarcations are registered in the clicking codes of the families and clans. These codes facilitate ready recognition of and interaction within a particular family and clan but exclude recognition of and interaction with other families and clans. They give a sense of togetherness and belonging that is crucial for adaptation to and survival within certain geographical settings. Other families and clans, in the meantime, can find ways of adapting and surviving in other settings by means of the group cooperation and togetherness made possible by the cultures of their own families and clans. An individual whale in all cases has a sense of its own selfhood and personal identity that is registered in the unrepeatable, readily communicable proper name accorded to it by the unique code conferred on it by its social group, and also made apparent by the role conferred on it by the social system of its

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particular culture. An individual whale can say to itself, as it were, “I belong here. I know myself as a particular self, and I am known as a particular self, by this community. I have a recognized place in this community.” Does each whale have a soul? It does so if having a soul means having a compelling sense of one’s own personal selfhood in the midst of other creatures with similar senses of self, and with whom one is in ongoing personal interaction. To be part of a vibrant whale society, giving every evidence of recognizing one another as parts of one’s family and clan, enjoying one another’s company, experiencing strong social bonds, depending on one another for protection and defense and developing ways to do so effectively, playing together by touching and rolling around with one another in the evenings, communicating and abiding by ingeniously constructed social codas— all of these customary modes of behavior among sperm whiles recounted by Safina give strong evidence of their being much more than automata or mere machines. The observations, facts, and interpretations in Safina’s book, including those supplied by his seasoned and astute mentor Gero, indicate creatures with conscious inward experiences and sophisticated judgments—conscious and sophisticated enough for them to be rightly characterized as not only lively interacting beings but beings capable of developing cultures and altering their cultures, as appropriate, over time. Their behavior is self-directed in many telling ways. It is not just the inevitable result of their genetic programming. Cultures are those modes of social group outlook, behavior, and life that are not the sole outcomes of the genetic makeups of members of the groups but are the groups’ own distinctive creations. These creations vary from social group to social group, and they must be taught and learned by the young of each new generation. Cultural traditions are also subject to modification as new environmental conditions or adaptive needs or opportunities arise. If the ocean temperature, salinity, or other conditions undergo radical change, for example, or if human intrusions into parts of the ocean and human threats to sperm whales’ customary habitats make the habitats no longer favorable for their flourishing or survival, they can endeavor to adapt to such changes with appropriate cultural changes. They can do so and have done so by adjusting their inherited patterns of culture in such a manner as to alter their annual migrations or customary breeding places, or to make other appropriate redirections in their customary ways of life. Their cultural creations and the pliability of these creations enable whales to do such things much more rapidly than if they and their species had to wait for more favorable genetic changes. Genetic alterations resulting from chance, the influences of environmental changes, and sexual selections can work together with changing cultures, some of them intentional and others

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perhaps less so, to insure successful, ongoing adjustments and adaptations to changing environments. Culture is not just a nice thing to have. It is for some species of life, including sperm whales, a necessary means of flourishing and survival. Safina does an instructive job in providing us with various examples of the workings of sperm whale cultures. The most impressive example is his description and analysis of the whales’ development and utilization of different kinds of complex communicating and detecting codes. The memories of sperm whales are also astonishing and provide evidence of another aspect of their conscious lives. In Safina’s book, Gero describes how three adult whales disappeared from a particular social unit. A few years later, these individuals came back and rejoined their original social group for a time. What this showed to him was that individual whales can experience separations over great spans of time and distance and yet remember one another and come back together again. Gero admitted that he had no idea of how this remarkable feat was possible. But it testifies to another kind of conscious awareness and behavior among sperm whales and shows once again that humans are not the only conscious beings on the face of the earth. NEW CALEDONIAN CROWS In my discussion of the consciousness of octopuses, based on the book by Peter Godfrey-Smith, I referred to his description of how small octopuses transported the halves of coconut shells to their dens, settling into one half as a bottom and pulling the other half over them as a cover, thus fashioning a kind of cozy protective house for themselves. Peter-Smith describes this action as a kind of toolmaking and cites it as one of many indications of the conscious lives and intentional actions of octopuses. A much more intricate kind of toolmaking by the crows (or corvids) of New Caledonia is described by the widely published naturalist and science writer Jennifer Ackerman in her book The Genius of Birds. I want to focus on her description of the crows of this region because I regard it as one more important type of evidence of the conscious inner lives of some creatures of nature other than us humans. New Caledonia is an archipelago or collection of islands located about 750 miles to the east of Australia. Presently a territory of France, the archipelago was named by the eighteenth century English explorer James Cook. He gave the archipelago this name because he saw in its islands a resemblance to the Scottish Highlands, Caledonia being a name given to Scotland by the Romans of the Roman Empire. Cook’s father was a Scotsman, but Cook himself was born in Yorkshire, a large county in the north of England. The New Caledonian crows are not particularly adept as flyers, but they are extraordinarily proficient as toolmakers. This proficiency is a cultural

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creation that, once mastered, is handed down to the young by the instructions of their elders. What does it involve? There are two versions of impressive, difficult-to-make, and hard to properly use tools that are routinely fashioned by the crows—one out of twigs and the other out of leaves. These tools, once made, are employed by the crows to probe with delicate, finely sensed manipulations into small cracks and crannies of trees and logs in search of succulent grubs that are for the crows a favorite kind of food. Both the fashioning of the tools as an important aspect of their culture and their successful manipulations of the tools in their hunt for the grubs as a central part of their diets provide convincing confirmation of the New Caledonian crows’ exceptional intelligence and active consciousness—especially when compared with the capabilities and practices of birds and other animals of their region. The crows have few natural predators on the islands, meaning that they have had little need for constant awareness of or continuous safeguarding against predatory threats. In consequence, they have had ample time during their days to develop and refine their tools, learn how best to use them, and to teach the young how to benefit from the elders’ acquired skills in making and using the tools. Young crows usually start with a tool set aside by an older one. They can study and learn from it. But the elders eventually need to help the youngsters to devise really sophisticated tools—a sophistication that is the outcome of the crows’ long experimenting and testing in the past. Both the effective teaching and the responsive learning attest to the crows’ natural intelligence and conscious awareness, and these traits have been further augmented by the birds’ active experimentation, training, and practice. They have noted the alluring presence of the seemingly inaccessible grubs, puzzled about ways to access them, and devised tools for this purpose. The tools then become a crucial part of their strategies for survival and enhancement of the quality of their lives. Natural selection and cultural adaptation have supplemented one another in this way. We can understand in this manner that consciousness is not a mere epiphenomenon or free-wheel spinning of the brain with no practical use. It is a critical capacity for flourishing and survival, a way of constantly exploring and adapting the environment of an organism to itself in ways that can benefit it and address its needs and wants. Let me take up then, the task of briefly describing the crows’ two kinds of toolmaking and the use to which the tools are devoted. In doing so, we can see how taxing and clever the creation of the tools is and how much dexterity is required for their productive use. The first tool requires the crow to whittle a twig with its beak in such a refined and clever fashion as to produce a neat little hook, properly shaped and oriented at one end, that can be used to capture the grubs. While the first sort of tool is fashioned from a twig, the second is created out of a leaf. The leaf is a pandarus leaf, which is a palmlike, tough leaf with barbs and parallel spines that can be stripped in a certain manner

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to produce a spear-like tool. Adult crows are experts at producing a tool in this manner that can probe into a hole and hook with its barbs the grubs lying within. Some tools of this second type incorporate a sophisticated flaring of the tool so that the narrower end can be inserted into the hole, and the wider one can be held comfortably in the crow’s beak as it manipulates the tool in seeking out and snaring the grubs. This process may sound relatively simple as described, but experts who study animal intelligence agree that both the designing and implementation of the tools take a lot of thought, ingenuity, and skill. Try to imagine creating a sophisticated tool, precisely adapted to and reliable for its purpose, using only your mouth and perhaps your feet, without the aid of two hands with opposable thumbs! You might object that the crows are just genetically endowed with toolmaking skill and that consciousness or intelligence need not be involved in order to explain their skill. But the innate capacity has to be supplemented with cultural learning, showing how truly complicated the skill is. Ackerman explains, drawing on reported experiments, that making sophisticated tools of the kinds described above requires a lot of teaching. The bird’s native ability is presupposed, but that ability must be activated by the long-established cultural practice of its group. A young crow will watch its mother probe for grubs by the use of her tool. It will borrow her tool and at first try to wedge it into a hole sideways. It has some sense of what the tool is for but does not know how to use it. Following the mother around at the age of two or three months and onward, the young crow slowly learns what kinds of sticks and plants are best for toolmaking. Making the pandanus tool requires the most observation, trial, and skill. At first, it rips up the pandanus leaves in more or less arbitrary ways. When it is five months old or so, it succeeds in producing a semblance of a tool. But the makeshift tool may not incorporate the necessary barbs of the leaf, for example, or have them pointing in the wrong direction. It takes almost a year and a half before the young bird has become proficient enough to make tools that can be used to ferret out grubs for itself effectively and routinely. The youngster’s extended regimen of fumbling, misdirection, and trial and error has finally resulted in a tool that is at least to some extent of its own design. Ackerman notes that this fact may account for the variation in regional styles of toolmaking in the crows’ environment. Toolmaking of this type requires a considerable amount of prolonged mental modeling, imagination, and purpose. It is an example of the presence and crucial role of consciousness in a nonhuman animal. The brains of birds are differently organized than our own, and of course they are a lot smaller. But the brains of at least some of them are comparable to ours in the sizes of their brains in relation to the sizes of their bodies. And

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the neuronal structures of their brains, as Ackerman points out early in her book, have a density of neurons, complexity of organization, and a lateral character capable of processing and integrating different kinds of information. These features are closely akin to those of human brains and the brains of nonhuman primates. The brains of birds came into being by lines of evolution different from those of cephalopods and mammals. The three lines are splendid examples of the workings of convergent evolution—different paths that have arrived at similar outcomes. That the New Caledonian crows’ brains, in interaction with other aspects of their bodies, and this manner with their environment, should be capable of generating and giving support to an impressive degree of conscious reflection, experimentation, and skill should come as no great surprise once we take the time to think carefully and open-mindedly about the matter. The crows’ inner awareness is coordinated with their outer environment, as we have also seen to be the case with octopuses and sperm whales, in such a manner as to facilitate a rich life of flourishing and survival. It is entirely fitting that we should by now become acutely cognizant of the conscious awareness of other forms of life on this earth that is our common home. Recognition, appreciation, and respect for the inner lives of these other creatures and for the ways in which they cherish and value their lives even as we do our own can have—and we can only hope, at long last, actually come to have—the result of reversing and ending the brutal, unthinking treatment and neglect with which we have all too often subjected nonhuman creatures, their species, their habitats, their ecosystems, and their natural environments. We are bound with them in a common biosphere, a biosphere of interlinked dependencies that make critical demands on our conscious reflection, careful planning, compassionate care, and responsible action as human beings. Failure to draw upon and dedicate our conscious abilities in this way, abilities so apparent in the science, technology, social systems, and many other aspects of our diverse, complex human cultures, threatens not only the flourishing and survival of countless other creatures of earth but our own as well. There is desperate need in our time for prudence to join hands with compassion in timely endeavors to heal the wounds we humans have long inflicted on the earth and our fellow creatures. Many of the latter have conscious lives akin in important ways and degrees to our own, and all of them have an inwardness of mind that shows them to be much more than meaty machines to be subjected to wanton human use or abuse.

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CONCLUSION I have devoted this chapter to descriptions, based on three authors’ expert observations and analyses, of striking aspects of the lives of three kinds of nonhuman animal. The ones described are the resourceful and delightfully playful eight-legged octopuses; the massive sperm whales with their sonar detections of prey and highly developed system of symbolic communication and social bonding; and the clever New Caledonian crows, astonishingly adept at developing and teaching the difficult craft of toolmaking. In each of these cases, there is evidence of cultural teaching and learning that supplement sexual selection and genetic modification as critical routes to flourishing and surviving with respect to the three animals’ quite different needs and environmental settings and demands. All of the present chapter has as its central task highlighting in three specific ways the presence and operation of consciousness in nonhuman forms of life. The chapter’s thesis is that consciousness is not restricted to human beings but can be clearly discerned to exist in various forms and degrees in many other species. There is thus not only some kind of mind in all living beings, as mind is characterized by Evan Thompson. There is also conscious mind in substantial numbers of particular species of life. These creatures of the earth, like humans, are not only inwardly self-making, sense-making, and purposive beings, but also beings with a keen inward self-awareness and awareness of parts of the world about them. They have conscious perspectives on themselves and their environments and are capable of consciously devised cultural strategies and traditions. Most important, they have considerable agential power to put knowingly into practice the resources of their inner lives, not only to adapt to their environments but to selectively attend to, interpret, and modify aspects of their environments in beneficial ways. In doing the latter, conscious animals are able to focus on and entertain aspects of their external environments that are necessary for and conducive to their well-being. They could not be reasonably expected to take consciously into account all of the complexities and intricacies of the external environment. They must be highly selective. The particular, specialized conceptions of their environments result is a distinctive outlook on or picture of the outer world that is suited to their own inner pleasures and pains, fears and contentments, delights and aspirations, challenges and rewards. Their awareness of themselves is modeled, in its turn, by awareness of the opportunities and constraints posed for them by these outer environments as so construed. Therefore, the inner and the outer perspectives are developed in coordination with one another. Awareness of self and its internal goings-on, and awareness of appropriate features of the outer world are mutually developed and

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mutually informed. All consciousness, whether of oneself or of one’s environment, is developed in this coordinate manner, as well as being always subject to change with the passage of time. There is no such thing, therefore, as an absolutely final or eternally true vision of the world by any or all conscious observers of the world. All such visions, including even the most sophisticated ones presently entertained by us humans, are selectively abstract, perspectival, partial, and defeasible—that is, more or less true or false and never completely or comprehensively so. In acknowledging this to be necessarily and unalterably the case for the animals of all species, including our own, we learn an important lesson in humility. In acknowledging the capacity of other animals for their own inwardly felt pleasures and pains, wants and needs, calculations and plans, anticipations and accomplishments, we learn another critical moral lesson as well: Treat the others of not only our own but of all other species in all relevant respects even as we humans would wish to be treated by one another. Human ethics, seen in this manner, is a subset of environmental ethics. It is far from exhausting the immense scope of appropriate ethical concern. Properly understood, this concern not only includes all the beings that are conscious in whatever degree but all of the other forms of life on which these beings depend for their necessary ecological relationships, as well as the crucial dependence of all forms of life—animal, insect, plant, fungus, bacterium, and the like—on the nonliving parts of the earth.

Chapter Four

Morality and the Inner Life

In chapters 1 through 3 I emphasized the relations of the inner and outer realms of mind and world, showing how essential each is to the formation and conception of the other. World is what mind takes it to be or how mind responds to it, even when mind is defined only in its most general and inclusive sense as the autopoeisis, sentience (or sense-making), and purposiveness of nonconscious forms of life, as these processes are defined by Evan Thompson. This is not to say that there is no world “out there” or that the outer world is only a figment of mind. It is to say that what the world is like for any type of organism, including us humans, is to a large extent a function of the particular wants, needs, responses, capabilities, perspectives, and the like of the organism. And the latter are shaped to a crucial extent in their turn by the particular environments in which the organism lives. In the case of humans, of course, these environments are extremely wide-ranging and much more varied than those of any other species because humans are not restricted to a particular occupational niche and have demonstrated ability to radically alter their environments. But many other organisms are capable of adapting their environments in some degree to themselves and are not just powerlessly adapted to or fixed within those environments. I explored in chapter 2 the inner consciousness of humans, but I also showed in chapter 3 that the members of some, if not many, nonhuman species are capable of consciousness to at least a significant degree. Thus consciousness is not confined to humans. And consciousness adds another dimension to other life-forms’ different responses to their worlds. It gives greater self-directed agency to those life-forms, both as individuals and as a species. It does so, not only by shaping their responses to and perspectives on the world but also by affecting the character and development of their inner lives. In this way, consciousness can also contribute to the development of appropriate cultural traditions and to the often considerable ways in which these traditions—taught, learned, and altered through the generations—can 67

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supplement their genetic makeups as eminently useful modes of ongoing adaptation to the world. I alluded earlier, but only in general terms, to some moral implications of these themes for our human attitudes toward and treatments not only of one another but of nonhuman creatures as well. I shall devote the present chapter to the task of delving more deeply and with greater detail into these moral implications in light of the analyses and arguments of the preceding chapters. I shall seek to show that the distinction between the inward and outward aspects of life-forms, and particularly of life-forms possessing consciousness to at least some degree, can have crucial moral relevance and importance. TWO KINDS OF OBJECTIVE WORTH Philosopher Robert Kane identifies two kinds of worthiness that we humans are deeply concerned about and yearn for: [T]he two dimensions of objective worth are connected to two aspects of the self. Worthiness for glory, or clear recognition with praise for deeds and accomplishments, is associated with the outer or public self—the roles, accomplishments, projects and achievements . . . we identify as ours and want to be worthy of recognition by others, whether or not we receive such recognition. Worthiness for concern or care, by contrast, . . . is connected with the inner life of consciousness and feeling that [Gerard Manley] Hopkins called the “inscape.” (Kane 2013: 138)

First, Kane is taking into account the fact that we earnestly hope that our accomplishments, deeds, and contributions that can be viewed and assessed in the outer or public realm will receive due recognition. We do not just want public recognition or acclaim as such. We want such acclaim to be acknowledged as fully merited or deserved rather than just perfunctorily announced or pretended. Even if the praise is not actually acknowledged by others in a public fashion, we want to be assured that our accomplishments of the relevant kinds are deserving of such public acknowledgment. We certainly do not want people to say one thing about them to our face but another behind our back. Kane calls this first kind of earnestly sought-for acknowledgment “worthiness for glory.” It is a worthiness out there in the world for others to recognize, and he rightly observes that all of us desire and value such publicly acknowledged or at least publicly recognizable worthiness. We not only want to be praised by others for our deeds. We also want our deeds to be praiseworthy.

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But Kane also points to another kind of worthiness, namely, a worthiness for care and concern based not so much on external accomplishments as on “the inner life of consciousness and feeling.” He goes on to observe that what he calls the “inscape” of each person is unique and that its uniqueness is something of singular, irreplaceable value that calls for moral recognition and respect. If I truly value you as a person, this is to say, I value not only your outward appearance, demeanor, and publicly observable achievements but your inner conscious life and experience—directly accessible only to you and to no one else, but indirectly apparent to others—as being of inestimable worth. And I profoundly wish also to be valued in this second way. I want to be valued for my individual selfhood as such and not just for my publicly recognizable deeds. I and every other human being are one of a kind and deserve and deeply want to be acknowledged as such. What Kane is describing is not just my desire for my own happiness and flourishing but my wish to be seen as deserving of happiness and flourishing from all points of view—and deserving, not just on account of my publicly recognizable accomplishments, but just for who I am as a distinctive person with a unique inner life. I want my subjective life to be validated for its inherent worth not only by myself but, at least in principle, by all others as well. I want it to be seen as deserving of objective worth. I want my inscapes or what Kane associates with my personal experiences and points of view—the uniqueness of my individual self-consciousness and firsthand consciousness of the world—to matter to such an extent that the world itself would be seen as having less value if I had not existed (Kane 2013: 164). Even more importantly, I hope and desire that just being the person I am and having the distinctive conscious needs, desires, aspirations, hopes, regrets, loves, and the like that I do entitles me to moral considerability, treatment, and concern. I rightly belong to what Kane calls “the moral sphere” (16–26) of outlook and regard because my existence as a person, and particularly my conscious inner life, is richly deserving of the readiness of others to attend to and seriously take into account my unique modes of awareness, points of view, strivings, and plans of action as a human being. Only I am directly privy to my own consciousness, and this fact in itself gives me a value and worthiness for moral considerability that is unique to myself but that also deserves recognition and respect by all others. I will develop this idea in more detail as my discussion proceeds. However, belonging to the moral sphere also requires, according to Kane, that I give like-minded moral consideration to the distinctive inner outlooks, convictions, and plans of others. This does not require that others agree in every detail with my way of seeing things and viewing myself and the world or that I must concur completely with theirs. It is only that they take seriously

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what I have to think, say, and do—seriously enough for there to be an imagined ongoing community of willingly shared dialogical inquiry, aspiration, and action when it comes to consideration of the demands of different moral situations and putting into practice agreed-upon proposals for action that arise out of such consideration. Given its unflinching ideal of openness to differing experiences, attitudes, feelings, convictions, and points of view, Kane’s ideal of the moral sphere is the sort of imagined community of inquiry and activity where there is continuing instruction and mutual enrichment resulting from receptive openness and attention—rather than bland indifference or stubborn opposition—to these differences. Dogmatic close-mindedness is to be resisted at all costs or at least to the extent that it is humanly possible. As fallible beings, we tend to cling tenaciously to our own outlooks, inclinations, and beliefs, especially the deeply rooted ones, and find it difficult to acknowledge the possibility of their being wrong or revisable in light of ongoing discussion or consideration of the different convictions of others. But agreeing to be a part of the moral sphere and trying to the best of our ability to think and act in accord with the sphere in our relations with others are what being moral and interacting morally with others basically amount to for Kane. In doing so or continuing to strive toward always doing so, I not only give full credit and praise to the outwardly graspable accomplishments of others. To the extent that I cultivate and maintain respect for the inner flourishing and pursuit of happiness in their own unique fashions by all others—in addition to my acknowledging and respecting their laudable external accomplishments— I show myself to be worthy of both kinds of respect from them. My openness toward and acknowledgment of their worthiness in these two respects entail for Kane my entitlement to their similar openness and acknowledgment toward me. Those persons who refuse to accept, abide by, or strive toward these ideals in general or to practice them in particular situations are guilty of breaking the moral sphere or willfully placing themselves outside it by their antagonistic attitudes and actions. Kane also discusses a number of scenarios in which there are grave difficulties with even the sincerest attempts to maintain moral sphere thought and action by its adherents, or at least to approximate as closely as possible to it. As with politics, moral decision making and acting in particular situations is sometimes no more or less than the art of the possible, of investigating and doing the best that can be done in trying situations. But important as Kane’s discussion of such troublesome and sometimes extremely vexing scenarios is for the further development of his moral theory, I do not need to attend to them for my purpose here. In order to present and develop my own reflections on Kane’s commendable conception of the moral sphere approach to the moral life and the fully

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developed theory of morality that he bases on this approach, I want to take a critical look at his interpretation and use of the nineteenth century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea of the “inscape” and the role Kane gives to this idea in his thinking about moral attitudes and moral lives. Then I want to trace out the moral implications, as I see them, of the inward lives of all living beings, human and nonhuman alike, whether these beings are conscious or not. In doing the latter, I shall take note of an observation Kane­makes about morality and nonhuman forms of life. First, then, let us look at Hopkins’s notion of the inscape, how Kane interprets it, and how I propose that we make use of it. As we can see from this chapter’s internal quotation, Kane interprets Hopkins’s term inscape to refer to “the inner life of consciousness and freedom.” This interpretation of the term’s meaning for Hopkins may hold true to some extent, and I shall speak to that point in a moment. But the primary meaning Hopkins himself gave to this term was more that of uniqueness or non-repeatability, especially in a given moment of time. He endeavored to prepare his mind over the years for instant discernment of this uniqueness and to portray or express it to the best of his ability in his notebooks and in his poetry. In the poetry, he wanted to catch the distinctive, experience of tree, sky, bird, fish, mountain, and the like at a fleeting moment—its shape, shadows, coloration, spatial orientation, reference to its surroundings, movement, and so on, with entirely unique, unrepeatable, and precise poetic accuracy—just as an impressionistic painter might aspire to do with the painter’s brush. Inscape is thus the truth or reality of a particular thing at a particular moment, not when the character of the thing is conceived or stated abstractly but when it is imagined, felt, and perceived concretely—when it is seen for what it uniquely is, for its particular suchness or thisness.1 The inwardness of each person’s conscious experiences is unique in this sense for Kane. And he is right in thinking it to be so. No one else can experience the world from the distinctive, precise, unsharable standpoint of my particular consciousness, either in general or at any particular time. I cannot be the inner you, and you cannot be the inner me. No one else can enter directly or immediately into my private experiences, outlooks, pursuits, or feelings. Aspects of them can be indirectly communicated to others by facial or other bodily expressions and behaviors, by specific actions, by the use of words, or by such artistic means as painting, sculpting, music, dance, and the like. But there is a fundamental difference between inferring them, hearing about them, observing or participating in them in these ways and experiencing them at firsthand. Kane’s use of the term inscape to connote immediate and individually privileged conscious awareness is thus markedly different from that of Hopkins, but there is still an important overlap of meaning and use.

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To avoid misinterpretation and possible misunderstanding, I will continue to speak of the inner lives of living beings rather than speaking of their inscapes. But I do place special emphasis in the present discussion of the moral import of the distinction between the inner and the outer by stressing, as Kane does, the uniqueness of each person’s inner life and the irreplaceable, inestimable value of that uniqueness. And I agree with him that much and perhaps even the best and most important part of morality hangs on profound recognition, respect, and care for this central value. If I make no effort to see the world as you see the world from within, then I will fail to regard you morally in the fullest sense of that term. I will fail because I have not had the same kind of regard for you that I routinely assume for myself. From an objective point of view, there is no relevant moral difference between you and me. Your inner life is as every bit as important to you as mine is to me. To be moral in our relations with one another requires that we think and act in light of this fact. Even if a person is filled with self-recrimination or self-hatred, and this is the dominant tone of that person’s inner life, morality requires that I try to envision and cherish the better side of that person’s nature and the person’s potentiality for appropriate self-affirmation. I want the best for the person’s inner life morally, just as I naturally desire the best for my own. And I cannot help assuming or at least hoping that beneath any person’s despair of self there remains a residual longing to discover in some way a dependable basis for appropriate self-love, for affirmation of the unique potentiality and value of the person’s inner experience, for recognition and respect by others for this unique potentiality and value as well as for its outward contributions and accomplishments. The truly moral person desires not only appropriate personal happiness and fulfillment, but happiness and fulfillment as sought for and experienced by each other person in that person’s own fitting and particular ways. The moral person aspires and works continually toward this goal. If I fail to value your inner life as I instinctively wish for you to regard mine, then I show myself to be undeserving of your positive moral appraisal and treatment of me in this crucial respect. And if I ignore, disparage, or refuse to honor your worthy outward contributions to the world, I forfeit my entitlement to your positive moral responses to my contributions as well. In Kane’s terms, I thereby place myself outside of the moral sphere. To be within the moral sphere requires open, receptive, empathetic, continually cultivated concern and care for the unique and inestimable value of each person’s conscious inner life. Welcoming attitudes toward and honest expressions of appreciation for outward manifestations of other persons’ competencies and accomplishments are also of undeniable moral importance. It is the combination of this second stance with resolute care and concern for all persons’ conscious lives and experiences that constitutes for Kane the heart of the moral

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life. Frank acknowledgment of my personal desire for happiness, flourishing, and fulfillment, and for recognition by others of my contributions and accomplishments, is the starting point for analysis of the nature of moral goodness, but it cannot be its sole focus or stopping point (see Kane 142). Moral egoism is thus a contradiction of terms. In the moral life, ideally conceived, you and all persons should matter unreservedly to me both inwardly and outwardly, and I should matter unreservedly to you and to all other persons in these two fundamental ways. Each of us and all of us together will continually aspire to this absolute or universal ideal in its applications to all persons and in this way show ourselves to be sincere, fervent seekers for life and commitment within the moral sphere. Emphasis on the applicability of moral thought and action in both its outward and inner senses to everyone without exception is what constitutes for Kane the maximum objectivity of moral values as elucidated by the ideal of the moral sphere. I agree with Kane’s conception of the moral sphere. I believe that it takes us a long way toward understanding what is most essential to the moral life. But what about young children, mentally deficient humans, and particular other kinds of life that lack the capacity for self-reflection? How should we conceive our moral attitudes and obligations toward them? Is there any similarity in such cases to Kane’s conception of the moral sphere as it pertains to human beings? And if so, how much similarity is there? Here is how he answers this question: “Our ethical obligations extend to all beings with inscapes capable of suffering, not merely to persons or rational agents, though . . . the obligations take different forms toward rational beings capable of self-reflection and toward beings with inscapes not so capable” (146). He insists that treating such living beings cruelly or with no moral concern for the unique importance and value of their distinctive inner lives indicates that one has fallen outside the moral sphere and revealed oneself to be unworthy of being treated with openness by others or to have one’s own inner outlooks, feelings, and pursuits be unequivocally valued by them. I applaud his answer and heartily agree with the main thrust of it, but I differ from it in one respect that I think requires qualification. Kane seems in the passage quoted above to restrict self-reflecting, rational life-forms to human beings or “persons,” while I sought to show in the previous chapter that neither self-reflecting awareness nor rationality is a capability restricted to human beings among the creatures of the earth. The clever and even sometimes ingenious behaviors, skills, and cultural creations of octopuses, sperm whales, and New Caledonian crows show them to have conscious or self-reflective, curious, puzzle-solving, rational capability in a variety of respects. Rationality, like consciousness, is therefore not confined to humans.

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The two capabilities differ from those of humans, not absolutely but only in degree. This claim holds true for many other nonhuman forms of life. Kane is certainly well within his rights in stressing the immorality of inflicting or allowing the needless or unwarranted suffering of nonhuman creatures, and in showing how such actions would constitute a fundamental breach of the moral sphere when that sphere is properly interpreted to include them. But concern and care for the flourishing of the inner lives of these creatures includes more than being careful not to inflict or allow others to inflict suffering on them. It is the much larger task of being carefully concerned with every aspect of their inner lives, including their conscious pleasures and aspirations as well as their pains and avoidances, whenever applicable, and of taking care not to countenance or contribute to their needless deaths. The pressing need for this moral concern extends also to concern for the integrity and well-being of the environmental settings and habitats of all of the earth’s creatures. To lack such care and concern in any of its necessary dimensions is to lack in that way or to that extent entitlement to moral recognition and respect for one’s own inner flourishing. In similar fashion, to be oblivious to the contributions each kind of life makes to its fellow creatures, to its ecosystem and environment, and to our own well-being as humans, is to lack appropriate moral sensitivity to that form of life’s external contributions and value, and to lose an imagined entitlement to its similar perspective on me as a fellow creature of the earth. The objectivity and universality of the moral sphere encompass all forms of conscious life and extend to appropriate and due moral consideration for the well-being of all forms of life whether conscious or not, and for their contributions and relations to their environments. What rightly count as appropriate and due consideration has to be carefully weighed in particular cases—for example, those involving pathogens or other possibly avoidable endangerments by one form of life to the lives of others, where it might be morally right to sacrifice one life-form in order to save another. Such considerations also apply to the moral decisions and actions of humans in their relations to one another in conflictual situations. The moral sphere constitutes an overall ideal for decision and action, not a detailed recipe for how to act in every particular situation. Conflicts of goods cannot be avoided, and our moral lives as humans call for thoughtful anticipations and imagined adjudications of such conflicts in our own cases and in those relating to nonhuman creatures, and for reasoned judgments about how to deal with such conflicts of goods when they arise in specific situations. Life in all of its forms, and in both its inward and its outward aspects, is something of value, and we humans should strive for as much mutual flourishing and harmony of life-forms in their relations with one another as possible. Predation is of course a pervasive fact of nature, the manner in which the

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energy of the sun is distributed as food through the innumerable forms of life on the face of the earth. But wanton, unthinking, uncaring, unnecessary inflictions of suffering or death on one creature by another—and especially by human beings fully capable of conscious moral thought, judgment, and action in their relations to other creatures—is morally reprehensible. Killing animals for fun or for trophies is an especially deplorable and immoral practice. Each stone on earth is admittedly unique just by virtue of being the particular stone that it is and not some other stone. It is not uniqueness per se or uniqueness of any kind that calls out for moral consideration and care. I am talking here about the uniqueness of each individual life-form, especially when its inward aspect includes some degree of conscious awareness. Each human self, a fortiori, has this kind of morally relevant uniqueness. To crush the stone is a different matter from crushing a life, to say nothing of a conscious human life. The mandate of the two preceding paragraphs loudly resounds in Kane’s imagined moral sphere as it applies to humans and by appropriate extension to all other living creatures. To live the moral life as humans is continually to strive and act in such a manner as to acknowledge the moral value of the inner and outer lives of all living beings, human and nonhuman alike, to the fullest extent possible—and to work to preserve and enrich that twofold value as much as we can, both individually and in concerted action with one another. A FICTIONAL CASE STUDY: DELLA AND JACK In this section, I want to illustrate how Kane’s moral sphere can work in a particular case. The case is the interaction of the two main characters in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Jack who live in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. The novel is a work of imagination, of course, and not a description of two real people. But it provides the kind of in-depth depiction of the lives of two fictional characters that gives us felt insight into two things. The first is a profound description of the inner and outer life of Jack, a person who lives an intensely detached and lonely inner life and whose outward life is a mystery even to himself. He hovers constantly over an abyss of suicidal despair, of self-repulsion and self-rejection. He deplores the manner of his outward life, stretching from his childhood to the present, and seems to himself as well as to many others to have proved himself to be incapable of ever changing it. I will discuss some of the details of his inner and outer life as this section unfolds. On the other hand, there is the character of Della. She shares in some of the acute distaste for the hypocrisy of certain social norms and practices that also weigh heavily on Jack’s mind. She is unsure in some important respects

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about the future course of her own life, as Jack more fundamentally and more life-threateningly is. But she loves Jack unreservedly and recognizes and gives unstinting aid and support to the unique value of his inner life in ways that he himself finds to be nearly impossible. Jack is also passionately in love with Della but anxious to avoid hurting her and troubled about how best to relate to and behave toward her, given his own dismal past record of seeming not to be able to avoid injuring, disappointing, and betraying others, including members of his own family, especially his father. He does not really know why he acts as he does, and his dire lack of self-knowledge and self-trust affects his relations with Della. He sees himself as a kind of blunt instrument that thrashes about and destroys, in spite of himself, whomever or whatever happens into its vicinity. He fears that Della will be one of its victims even as he tries to seek only the best for her and for their relationship. Della considers herself to be Jack’s wife and bears his child, even though she and Jack are not officially married. She struggles throughout the novel to help Jack find ways to affirm himself and to activate his potentiality as a good person—to achieve appropriate self-love and appropriate ways to contribute to the well-being of others. She is an exemplar, although a complicated and realistic one in her own right, of the admirable moral life as conceived by Robert Kane—and, under his tutelage, as exhibited in the previous section of the present book, by me. Through the magic of her exquisite mastery of the art of the novel, Robinson’s story of the lives of Jack and Della gives concrete expression to what it can mean to be in desperate need of openhearted moral consideration and care by others and to experience the healing and restoring effects of that care, both inwardly and outwardly. We learn through our imaginative participation in the lives of these two characters how inordinately hard and demanding the moral life can often be when viewed from the perspective of either its agent or its patient. I presented an outlook on the character of moral thought and aspiration in the previous section. But the outlook was presented abstractly and theoretically, although I hope usefully. Robinson’s novel helps us to see what happens when a version of this vision of the moral life is applied by one person to another in a situation of extreme fragility of will and bewildering need. Della does not know, of course, about Kane’s theory of the moral sphere and its stringent requirements, but she unwittingly puts it into active and at least partly effective practice. She does so a growing degree in the case of Jack, but her loving approach and action end up being instructively effective for her own case as well. Brothers Jack and Teddy are virtual twins in appearance, but Teddy was born more than a year later. Jack’s was a difficult and lengthy birth, causing great suffering to his mother, almost to the point of killing her. This fact presages Jack’s life of causing harm to himself and others. Teddy, on the other

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hand, is a paragon of success as a doctor and of loving attention to Jack’s needs, providing regular sources of money to alleviate his poverty. In order to do so, Teddy has to try to figure out where Jack is at any given time, but he usually does so with success. Jack is annoyed by Teddy’s kindness but also grateful for his help. Teddy epitomizes an ordinary socially acceptable and commendable kind of life, while Jack’s life is the precise opposite. As a child and young adult, Jack stayed away from most family gatherings and was frequently nowhere to be found. He never committed himself to his Presbyterian minister father’s ardent religious outlook and moral instruction, much to the father’s sorrow. The father blamed himself throughout his life for Jack’s moral failures, and Jack was a continuing source of sorrow for his mother as well. Jack was guilty of numerous acts of petty theft, liked to break things, and seemed unable to avoid inflicting discomfort or loss on others. He had a façade of causal charm, but beneath its surface was a conniving character that seemed to pay little heed to the well-being of others or to his own status or image in his community. He was already notorious in his little town of Gilead when, as a kind of lark, he seduced a teenage girl from a poor family. She became pregnant and bore a female child. But Jack took no responsibility for the child and eventually left town without a concern or care for the mother or child. After leaving Gilead, he becomes a wanderer, a wastrel, a drunkard, a gambler, a cheater, and a thief. He lives in shabby boardinghouses. He wears badly worn secondhand clothes. He is beaten by two men because he has not paid back the money they have lent him as a gambling debt. Outwardly, his life is a mess. He is even sentenced to a penitentiary for a period of time for a crime he did not commit. But inwardly, he is in even worse shape. He is engulfed by feelings of loneliness, failure, and despair. He is a mystery to himself, unable to account for his actions or the course of his life. He seems unable to avoid inflicting harm on others. All of his resolutions to change the destructive directions of his life go awry and come to naught. Whatever efforts he makes toward constructive change of his life and character end up in failure. He regards himself as a hopeless bum and even as a kind of Prince of Darkness. And yet, in the midst of all of these failures and blights of character, Jack is a man with many talents and gifts. He draws beautiful pictures in pencil. He improvises and plays in spectacular fashion on the piano. He takes a job at one point as a dance instructor and exhibits great skill in quickly learning and adroitly performing the various kinds of dance, charming middle-aged women dance pupils in the process. Teenagers marvel at his jitterbugging skill. He has a prodigious memory. He has an engaging sense of humor and, when he wants to be, is adept at small talk and social graces. And yet, he feels extremely uncomfortable in social settings. He is able to recite long passages

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of poetry and spends hours in libraries reading various poets. He knows many passages of the Bible by heart, has read a surprising number of theological writings, and has an extensive theological vocabulary. He is inquisitive, smart, and well informed. The contrast between his evident intelligence and abilities and his reprobate lifestyle motivate far less-gifted fellow reprobates to call him “the professor” and to feel greater contempt for him as a person than they would if he were more like themselves. Jack has a highly unusual frank, unrelenting honesty about himself, an honesty that causes him no end of probing self-analysis, self-doubt, and self-contempt. But he remains throughout a mystery to himself. He broods on his failures and thinks frequently about suicide as the way to end his troubles and the harms he seems unable to avoid inflicting on others. He yearns at the very least to acquire the negative virtue of being harmless to himself and others but seems powerless to learn how to do so. His good resolutions seem always to be eventually breached by serious lapses of judgment and action or to lead to consequences beyond his anticipation and control. Della meets Jack for the first time in a large cemetery in St. Louis. She brought flowers to a grave there in the late afternoon and accidentally stayed in the cemetery past its closing time. So she is now locked in for the night. Jack happens to be in the same cemetery because he sometimes sleeps there along with many other vagrants who lack rooms or beds. They meet, begin to converse, and end up talking all through the night with one another. They are fascinated with one another and soon begin to fall in love. The dark night in the cemetery becomes for them a kind of escape from society. Della is a Black woman whose father, like Jack’s father, is a minister. She left Memphis, where her father’s large church is located, in order to begin teaching in a Black school in St. Louis. Della is independent-minded and deeply thoughtful. Like Jack, she loves literature, and especially poetry. Also like Jack, she is uncertain about the course of her life and about her relations with her large family back home. Both of them are anxious searchers for better understanding of the mysteries of human existence and of their own selves in relation to society and the world. Jack’s searches are filled with dark foreboding, while Della’s are more like the quest for autonomy and fulfillment in the radically segregationist society of mid-twentieth century America. Also, she like Jack has had to struggle with a father whose religious beliefs place strong emphasis on the safety of conformity rather than the risks and insecurities of open-minded self-examination and self-discovery. Most particularly, her father is a disciple of Marcus Garvey’s separationist program for Black people, stressing their need to develop their own lives apart from White people instead of trying to be accepted by them and given equal rights with them. Her father would be horrified by the prospect of a love affair between Della and Jack, to say

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nothing of a marriage and the introduction of an interracial child into his pristine Black family. Despite all of this, they fall in love and Della eventually gives birth to their child. The story of all of this is fascinating in its own right, and it is beautifully recounted by Robinson. But the thing I want to stress about it here is Della’s unwavering love for Jack, despite the alienated, desperate, destructive quality of his external life and the profound loneliness, remorse, and perplexity of his inner life. She loves him simply for who he is as a unique person, failures and all—a person in whom she finds many redeeming qualities and potentialities for happiness and goodness. He has never been able to recognize or actualize these in himself, but she respects and values them clearly and consistently throughout their relationship, and in that way helps him at least begin to do so as well. In tirelessly working toward this end, she is an exemplar of the moral life as that is conceived by Kane. She intensely values not only Jack’s prospects for rightly recognized and valued contributions to the world but also his inestimable value as a unique human being. By acting in this way toward Jack, she shows herself to be richly deserving of moral concern and care, and helps Jack to find new direction and healing in his life—starting with his relationship with her and their child and then extending toward the broken relationship with his father that has lain behind so much of his inner distress and alienation from his mother, siblings, and godfather and namesake, the Reverend John Ames (Jack’s baptismal name is John Ames Bougton). Jack makes subtle but discernible progress in these directions, but he still has a long way to go by the time of the conclusion of Jack, as well as by the end of two other interconnected novels by Robinson, Gilead and Home. In Gilead, his godfather John Ames plays a role toward Jack similar in some respects to that of Della. In Home, his sister Glory has a comparable relation with Jack. The burdensome weight of Jack’s past neglects, misdeeds, and failures; the precarious fragility of his conscious inner life and striving; and outward circumstances such as the vicious prejudice by Della’s father against Jack’s continuing relationship with Della and the fact of their interracial child, continue to threaten and impede his progress. There is no Hollywood ending in these novels, but they trace out the complex and frustrating, and yet hopeful character of Jack’s arduous struggle, both within himself and in his relations to others. The most promising aspect of his life is his love for Della and her unfailing love for him. This love is the principal ground of their mutual hope. The conviction that every human self or soul is unique in importance and value, and as such is the appropriate and commanding focus of our love and care for one another, is extremely strong in Robinson herself. It is vividly reflected in her stories about Della, Glory, John Ames, and Jack. Also reflected in the story is her strong belief that we relate morally to one another

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in the true sense only when we aspire to dig beneath the surface of a person’s public demeanor and behavior, important as that also is, to the inner core of a person’s conscious life. What is most important in this digging is not moral judgments about the goodness or badness of that inner life but respect for its inviolable sacredness, just by virtue of being the unique, marvelous, mysterious self that it is. Robinson even confesses that once she has imagined characters in her writings, she strives to listen to them talk about their inner lives, and about all the struggles, concerns, and firsthand feelings of their lives as they make their ways in relation to one another and to the world. She does not so much create them, in other words. Once they become real in her mind, they create themselves and the unfolding events of her novels. In an interview with Robinson by author and journalist Casey Cep in The New Yorker, Robinson says about the Reverend John Ames, the central character in an earlier novel entitled Gilead, that she had begun to hear his voice, once he was imagined. The story he was telling about his life and ancestors to his young son “came easily” to her. It was “like he was telling me the story, and all I had to do was listen” (Cep 2020: 49). Her account of Jack’s inner struggles and of the complexity and elusiveness of his inner life to himself and others was a similar act of close, nonjudgmental listening. His character brings into bold relief the unending challenge and difficulty of the moral life when rightly lived—the life of gracious respect and love for even the seemingly least lovable persons, not only as regarded by many others but as sadly felt and regarded within themselves and toward themselves. When we peel away the outer layers of each human life, beyond its external behaviors and even beyond its inner self-assessments, there remains the central core of its being as a unique and irreplaceable self. No other self ever has been or ever will be exactly like it or have its particular potentialities. The fact of its being not only unique, but a uniquely conscious self, above all else, constitutes its incalculable moral importance and value. Kane summarizes this idea extremely well when he says, “If what one loves is a person or any living thing and not merely a keepsake, to love it for its own sake is not only to want it to be and not to perish, but to want its being to go well rather than poorly, to want the being to be happy and flourish” (133). The very being of a living person or any other type of life, and especially of its conscious inner life when applicable, is a kind of absolute, universal, non-defeasible value—for the competent and compassionate moral appraiser. This is a fact about necessarily unceasing moral aspiration and endeavor that no merely external, scientific, or behavioral account is equipped to acknowledge or explain, much less to denounce or deny. Thus the moral life involves much more than judgments about external indications of character and behavior in persons. It rests finally on its vision

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of the incalculable value of each person’s inner life, personhood, or soul. In the cases of nonhuman forms of life, it requires similar respect for the inwardness of their particular experiences and feelings, and not just heartless concentration on their external utility as presumed mere “things” for humans. As we have seen, there is an inner aspect as well as an outer aspect for all living beings, and both require moral considerability, care, and compassion. The inner aspect is the most urgently deserving of the two from the standpoint of morality as I am strongly inclined to interpret its nature. But there would be no such thing as an inner life without a material, externally observable body to give rise to, sustain, and give it outward expression. And outward behaviors can have gravely destructive as well as creative and constructive consequences that require conscientious moral assessment and attention. MORAL VALUE, SPECIES OF LIFE, AND INDIVIDUAL LIVES Why is the uniqueness of a particular life in its interconnected inward and outward aspects something of inestimable value to be recognized, respected, and cultivated in the moral life? In the case of a unique species to which a particular type of life belongs, it has taken millions of years for it to come into being. For it to become extinct is for it to vanish forever from the face of the earth, never to be brought into existence again in this precise form. Its uniqueness is its irreplaceability. If it had value once as a form of life, then its extinction is the sad loss of this distinct value. In the case of a species whose life-forms are conscious in at least some degree, that specific kind or degree of conscious inwardness is an essential aspect of the species’ uniqueness, never to be replaced with this particular kind of quality and value. In addition, within each species through the whole course of its existence, there are the unique members of the species with their own unique outward and inward aspects. As we go down the scale from the most complex to the least complex species and members of those species, the uniqueness still pertains, although its character and value become less immediately discernible to us humans. There is commonality enough remaining in all cases for us to understand the interrelations of individual species and of different individuals within those species in ecological relationships with one another. But this particular frog and that one are not the same, just as the species of one type of frog is not the same as the species of another type. And the pain or pleasure of one frog is not the same as the pain or pleasure of another one. Everywhere there is the blend of commonality and difference, and they constitute all forms of life, whether we are talking about whole species or individual members of those species.

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The good or recognizable value of living nature in all of its aspects is a blend of the many and the one, of similarity or sameness of character or appearance with uniqueness and irreplaceability. The whole is good, but so is the ineradicable individuality of each and every part of the multifarious whole as essential contributors to it. The kinds of uniqueness, whether of species or individuals, vary in their readily perceivable character as we go from the lesser to the greater complexity of the forms of life. With greater complexity comes the possibility of more fully conscious forms of life. Consciousness of whatever degree is a value to be acknowledged and respected in its own right. The more consciousness, the more susceptibility to distinctly felt or directly experienced pleasure or pain, hope or regret, fulfillment or frustration, achievement or disappointment, and the greater moral need to respect and enable the former in such a list and to avoid or reduce, whenever possible, the latter. This need becomes all the more palpable to us humans when we perceive those pleasures and pains, satisfactions and sorrows, deprivations and rewards to be associable in evident ways with the qualitative complexity of our own consciousness. They include, for example, the pleasures and pains of the inquiring, aspiring, vulnerable conscious mind and not just those of the five senses. We see this clearly with Jack. ­In the case of the inner lives of other humans, the value of the uniqueness of those inner lives, when compared with the value we are strongly motivated to place on our own, is undeniable—at least if we are willing to give to it a modicum of attention. Moreover, this value extends to all humans, and not just to those with whom we happen to agree and with whom we happen to enjoy easy concourse, discourse, and companionship. Kane’s emphasis on the essential role of openness to the thoughts, convictions, and modes of life of others in our own aspirations to the moral life comes immediately to mind in this connection. This openness is not easy, and we will never succeed in entirely attaining it. It is an ideal to be endlessly striven for but never completely realized in any finite human life, as Kane wisely reminds us, observing “that in the end, you cannot open your mind to all points of view in an imperfect world” (113). Some points of view will be too cruel, destructive, hateful, or indifferent in their character to allow for easy routes to open consideration and tolerance. Tolerance is not the only virtue. There is a crucial aspect of moral judgment in authentic moral love. It does not foreclose forgiveness, but it also requires frank acknowledgment of moral failure. And it can be an essential element in moral progress—in oneself, in others, and in one’s relations with others. Those committed to lives of aspiration within the moral sphere should also seek to be models of behavior to those who decide to place themselves outside it, and to endeavor in whatever ways possible to persuade them to come within it—for the good of all concerned.

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Openness is a necessary route to social concord, but it is also a necessary condition for bringing to light commonalities of outlook and experience, generating honest respect for differences of background and perspective among unique subjects, expanding their understandings of one another and of issues at hand, highlighting crucial moral values, and unearthing important new ways of viewing and acting upon questions of truth and value. CONCLUSION I discussed and defended in this chapter Robert Kane’s conception of the “moral sphere” as an imaginative way of approaching the character of universal and objective moral thinking and acting. I placed particular emphasis on his idea that an individual’s qualification for participation in the moral sphere requires two basic things. The first is that those who endeavor to reflect, work, and interact within the moral sphere be willing to grant to all other individuals honest and unselfish recognition of the importance and worth of their accomplishments and contributions that are externally observable. The second is that individual supporters of the sphere strive toward maximum consideration and care for the incalculable worth of other individuals’ unique internal lives of conscious enjoyments, yearnings, purposes, plans, struggles, anxieties, frustrations, regrets, and the like. These inner lives have unique moral importance in the sense that only one individual can experience them firsthand and that they cannot be replaced or replicated by any other individual’s firsthand experiences. Moral recognition of these inner lives’ singular value is informed by the intuitive importance and worth each individual assigns to that individual’s own firsthand experience and awareness. There is no convincing reason to minimize or fail conscientiously to exercise moral care for the fundamental importance to others of an inner field of awareness that has obvious unrepeatable, inestimable value to oneself. The firsthand experiences of each individual are distinctly the individual’s own, but there are also broad similarities in such experiences—as we learn from our ongoing communications and interactions with one another—that give them recognizable common value and intrinsic importance. Following Kane’s suggestion, I also extended these two fundamental features of a universal and objective moral outlook to include nonhuman forms of life, especially those capable in some degree of a conscious inner life. In doing so, I relied on the investigation of consciousness in other animals carried out in the previous chapter. The outcome of this investigation shows that consciousness is not the sole possession of humans and that the value of

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consciousness and inner experiences in nonhuman creatures is also a fitting focus of moral consideration and response. Bona fide human participants in the moral sphere should aspire to recognize and value not only the many contributions nonhuman creatures make to their external ecosystems and to the earth as a whole—including to us humans as part of the interlocked life-forms of the earth—but also the intrinsic worth of these nonhumans’ individual consciousnesses, to whatever extent such consciousness is a basic feature of their inward lives. In manners similar to our own conscious experiences, there are numerous types of nonhuman animal that give evidence not only of firsthand pleasure and pain, but also of confidence and fear, joy and sorrow, anticipation and disappointment, satisfaction and frustration, and the like. To be active participants in the moral sphere means that we should respect and cherish the objective or universal value of these aspects of their inner lives even as we respect and cherish the similar aspects of our own conscious experience. When conscious to at least some degree, nonhuman forms of life have an inner awareness that is part of their being and worth, and this fact must be borne in mind as we relate to them and to their species. In no case is such a type of life to be appraised or treated merely in an exclusively external, utilitarian fashion. There will of course be conflicts of goods between our human forms of life and nonhuman ones, but none of the relevant goods should be simply ignored or left out of account as we seek to address and find solutions to those conflicts. This is true on the level of human interactions with one another, and it is also true on the level of our relations to the myriad nonhuman types of life on our planet. Thus the moral sphere should not be regarded as pertaining solely to human beings. In arguing this way, I expanded in my own fashion on a brief suggestion of Kane’s book, which is devoted almost entirely to moral relations among human beings. Morally speaking, the intricate relations of the outer and the inner are of utmost importance, and the force of this observation extends to individual creatures other than those of our own species. I discussed a specific, albeit fictional, example of consideration and care for the inner life of a human being by describing the compassionate, nonjudgmental concern Della exhibits toward Jack. This allows Jack to share with her his deepest and most troubling regrets, misgivings, failures, perplexities, and self-condemnations, along with his desperate hopes for routes to a more positive and healing self-understanding and a better way of life. He wants to turn his life radically around, but he does not know how to do so and lives a life of aching despair. Della helps him in all of these respects by loving Jack as the unique person, full of promise in his inner consciousness that she sees him to be, and as the commendable person in his outward comportment and behavior she is convinced he has the capacity to become.

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Jack is deeply wounded in his inner consciousness and inner self, and Della’s intense, unselfish, openly sharing love is the balm he needs for the soothing of his lifelong wounds and the saving of his soul. There is nothing explicitly religious in her relation to Jack, but it is covertly so in the sense that she carefully recognizes and attends to the sacred value of his unique inner life and perceives its intimate connections with the redemption of his outward behavior. Her acceptance of him and hope for his existential and moral progress are generous and unqualified, despite his seeming lack of worth to himself or to others. She is for him a means of grace. One might object that all of this is the expression of Della’s romantic love for Jack and not so much an example of dispassionate moral regard for him. She loves him deeply and unreservedly. This is true. But there is much more than romantic attraction in her care for Jack. He is outwardly no prize for any woman’s love. He gives every outward indication of being a hapless reprobate and hopeless bum, entirely unreliable and unpredictable as a loving partner for a sound and dependable, mutually supporting long-term relationship. He cannot depend on himself to think or behave in reliable and predictable ways, and he seems to be incapable of financially supporting even himself. But Della sees beneath the surface and recognizes in Jack a uniquely loving, lovable, and gifted person. She cherishes his inner life for what it presently is and for what it has the possibility to become. For all of his admitted serious defects and failures of character, Jack is insightful, talented, and honest at heart—even ruthlessly and self-destructively honest when it comes to admitting to himself his own serious failings—and Della appreciates and affirms the person she quickly and resolutely comes to know and love. Della is to my mind a paragon of the moral ideal as Robert Kane analyzes and describes it, a conscientious, trustworthy, resilient participant in the moral sphere in her relationship with Jack. Furthermore, the excellencies of character she exhibits are presented in the novel as carrying over to her relationships with all others. It is notable that as her relations with Jack grow and mature, she becomes more able to deal constructively with the challenges of her own ongoing life. These are many challenges, including being Black in a largely White and pervasively prejudicial society, having a domineering father and conservative family, entering into an interracial love relationship she regards as a marriage that will evoke widespread public disapproval, and birthing a child born to interracial parents and destined because of that fact to suffer the taunts, criticisms, and rejections of school and society­. She grows in confidence and self-esteem in the face of these challenges and finds a path in life that is truly her own rather than being imposed on her by family or society. The love and acceptance she receives from Jack are of immense help to her in this process of developing her own freedom, courage, self-affirmation, and self-discovery.

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The moral sphere, when it works as Kane intends for it to work, is a context of mutual solace, helpfulness, and support. Jack and Della are its beneficiaries. It is morality in action, an affirming and enabling life of thought, word, and deed for all who live and work within its scope. It is a difficult and demanding way of life, and assuredly much more for some than for others, as we are reminded in the case of Jack. But in its difficulty also lie its great rewards—both for inner lives of conscious aspiration and awareness and for outer lives of effective contribution to the good of all those, human and nonhuman alike, guided and affected by its commitments, principles, and actions. It has planted seeds of renewal in Jack’s life and in his relations to others. NOTE 1. For informative discussions of Hopkins’s conception of the inscape, see https:// crossref-it.info/articles/187/inscape-and-instress and https://hopkinspoetry.com/.

Chapter Five

Persons and Things

This book is devoted to examining the relations of the inner with the outer, or of subjectivity with objectivity, in our relations with the world and with one another. Its central thesis is twofold. First, it is a grave mistake to try to reduce the subjective to the objective, or persons to things, because in doing so we lose sight not only of the crucial differences between the two but also of the essential role of subjectivity in all inquiries into the natures of the objective things of the world. There is no possibility of understanding anything in the objective world without subjectivity because subjectivity is the seat and arbiter of all understanding. Second, to reduce the subjective to the objective, as if it were nothing more than what can be comprehended from the perspective of the natural sciences, and to think and act solely from that perspective, is not only to overlook the obvious role of the subjects doing the reducing. It is also to invite an attitude of complete objectification that violates all of the canons and considerations of rational, moral, and aesthetic judgment. Selves are manifest in the world of objects in the forms of their physical bodies and external behaviors. But what is manifested in this manner is not something merely bodily, behavioral, or externally observable. It is the inner consciousness of the self, its irreducible and all-important subjective character. Self-conscious beings, seen in the first instance as objects—and this includes their modes of externally observed bodily appearance, comportment, and behavior—are like windows open to light from another source, as the English philosopher Roger Scruton points out: The world of the self-conscious being is a world in which there is love as well as attachment, and in which others exist as objects of obligation, places in the web of objects where light streams in from another source. Hence it is a world in which just and unjust, virtuous and vicious, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong are all distinguished. (2012: 67)

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This other source is their conscious selfhood and awareness, where moral and aesthetic judgments as well as all other kinds of attempt at adjudicating, understanding, relating, and knowing occur. The outer can have no intelligible point, purpose, or meaning without the attentions, concerns, and questions of the inner. This is as true of the scientific focus on the outer, when it attempts characteristically to study what is external and thus objectively observable and testable, as it is of any aspect of the relations of human beings to their world. The external becomes of interest or knowable only by means of the internal. And this means that we must take the latter seriously into account in our searches for fuller understanding of the former. The inner lives of consciously inquiring, observing, and deciding persons are necessary to our comprehensions of, and relations as humans to, outward things. The former cannot be eliminated or relegated to a subordinate role. Instead, the two are intimately related with one another. They are not the same, and neither can be reduced to the other. The scientific concern with objective, externally manipulable and testable modes of understanding is of undeniable benefit and value. Much if not most of our modern world would be impossible without scientific inquiries, techniques, and accomplishments. But science is only made possible by the subjective intentions and investigations of the scientists themselves and by their interactions as subjects with one another in the collective scientific enterprise. Subjects join with like-minded, like-intending subjects in the search for scientific knowledge. And they do so with canons of thought, investigation, and validation arrived at and agreed upon over many years by the scientific community—a community of conscious persons, not themselves mere objects or things. Thus subjects and objects are real, and neither is more real than the other. Neither is subsumable under the other. There is an outer world of externally observable and analyzable objects and relationships of objects. And there is an inner world by whose indispensable illumination these objects and relationships come to have character and significance for conscious minds. The outer world would not cease to exist in the absence of consciousness, but it would exist as unrecognized by conscious awareness, a kind of epistemic darkness unpenetrated by the light of subjectivity and understanding. Even nonconscious forms of life require the inner operations of their autopoeisis, sense-making, and purposiveness as their routes to adaptation, sustenance, and survival in the presence of the outward living and nonliving objects that surround them and may threaten their existence. Human animals devoid of subjectivity would live in very different worlds. They would be like automata groping in the dark and locked in impersonal competitions with one another and blind struggles with other aspects of their environments. There would be no moral or religious codes to guide them,

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no search for better ways of life to improve their relations with one another. There would be no aesthetic appreciation to awaken their sensitivities to the wonders and beauties of nature, or religious faith to give purpose, meaning, and depth to their lives and brighten their days. Without consciousness, morality, art, and religion would vanish from humanity’s world. Science would also be nonexistent. Humans, as well as all of the living forms of nature, would become mere machines were there no inwardness as a necessary aspect of their lives. In fact, life itself, at least as we know it, would cease to exist. In all kinds of life, outwardness is the sheltering shell of inwardness, and inwardness is the vital core of that outwardness. Scruton confines his insightful observations on this topic to humans (and God) in his book The Face of God, but I think they need to be extended to other kinds of life as well. In what follows in this chapter, however, my principal focus shall be on the interrelations of outwardness and inwardness in the lives of human beings. In doing so, I will discuss four main topics: the allure of machines, natural causes and human intentions, exploitation and respect, and the miracle of human consciousness. Before moving to the first topic, however, I need to make three clarifying comments. The first one relates to this chapter’s title, and the second and third, to its initial Scruton quotation. The term person in the chapter title is meant to refer to human beings for the purposes of this chapter, but I do not deny personhood of some type or degree to at least some other kinds of animal. This point is particularly evident in my discussion of sperm whales in chapter 3, where each whale is shown to have a particular identifying coda as a recognizably unique individual, and where individual whales act and behave in communal fashion with one another—even choosing in some circumstances to defend one another at risk of their individual lives when threatened with danger.1 Throughout his book The Face of God, Scruton makes a sharp distinction between persons and nonhuman creatures, while I do not. My view of personhood is more gradational or ranging along differences of degree than his is. So while I shall focus only on human persons in this chapter, I do not intend for the term person to be restricted to human persons. My second point of clarification relates to Scruton’s phrase “in which others exist as objects of obligation.” The term objects in this phrase might be confusing. In this context, it simply means focuses of obligation. It does not mean being treated merely as external objects and not as internal subjects. And again in reference to Scruton, I am not convinced that sperm whales, for example, cannot have felt obligations toward one another. This is my third clarification in relation to my own point of view. As we saw in chapter 3, sperm whales are preeminently social beings, bound together in well-defined tribes and clans and possessed of sophisticated symbolic means of communication with one another. I think it would be a mistake to regard these

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recognizably conscious beings as only instinctively or reflexively and not consciously or thoughtfully obligated to one another in some very real and significant sense of this term. All animals, including human animals, are dependent on the food chain that relates to their ultimate dependency on the energy of the sun. This means that all animals are predators, whether their predations are on plants, other animals, or both. Animals of the same species, such as sperm whales, can be consciously obligated to one another in the manner just described. But sperm whales must also prey on other creatures of the sea in order to survive. A similar reliance on the destruction of other forms of life for food is necessary for all species of life, including our own species. The goods of life itself and of a kind of obligation to one another among the social types of living beings depend on the role of predation of some kind (or kinds) in sustaining life. Ecosystems of all sorts, therefore, are combinations of life and death. Nature, in being pro-life, as it manifestly is, must also be pro-death, as the necessary means for sustaining life. This fact exhibits the ambiguity of nature. What is good from one perspective, namely, the predator, is bad from the perspective of the prey. Our obligation as humans, as I see it, is to respect all forms of sentient life and to avoid inflicting on them unnecessary deprivation, suffering, or death. We have choices in this respect that nonhuman forms of life typically do not. We do not have to eat other animals and can restrict ourselves to eating only plants, a course of life to which I and my wife are committed. But even here, plants must die in order for us to live. THE ALLURE OF MACHINES Since the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, humans have been fascinated and even mesmerized by machines. Machines made the industrial revolution possible, and they have become increasingly complex and multitasking from that time to the present. To see something as a machine is to see it as analogous to a closed logical system because in a properly designed machine one thing follows another in inexorable and entirely predictable fashion. In an automobile engine, for example, a key is turned, the starter turns over the engine, the fuel mixture is injected, the spark plug fires, the fuel is exploded, the piston is forced down, another ascends in turn, the crankshaft is rotated, the wheels are driven, and the automobile moves. Mere chance is excluded as far as possible, and there is no such thing as freedom in the sense of some kind of choice among alternative possibilities. Everything about a machine is externally observable, and its processes can be analyzed and understood as such. Its workings are automatic and exhibit no in-principle mysteries or barriers to understanding.

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No matter how complex a machine may be, its actions can be comprehended as uninterrupted cause-effect relations where one process produces another, that process produces still another, and so on, in a manner similar to the way in which a set of axioms, rules of operation, and primitive definitions can produce theorems, these in turn producing other theorems, and so on—all in deductive fashion with no need for recourse to any other kind of reasoning. The machine, of course, expends usable energy and is thus not totally self-sufficient or self-contained. It is also subject to friction and must be kept carefully lubricated when moving physical parts are involved. And it must be cooled in some fashion to keep it from overheating. But its workings are designed so as to be as closely analogous to a logical system as possible in its long-lasting, smoothly running, entirely dependable, wholly analyzable character. The prospect of total, in-principle explicability and predictability is a seductive lure to the inquiring mind, especially a mind that will be satisfied with nothing less than the elimination of all loose ends and uncertainties, and the attainment of complete comprehension. This seduction has become so subtle and entrancing in our Industrial Age as to give rise to the tantalizing suspicion and even the hope that everything in the universe, including all living things on earth, can be properly regarded as machines when they are fully understood. This is a modern version of the ancient “quest for certainty,” as the philosopher John Dewey characterizes it in his book by that name, first published in 1929. When the machine model has become the ideal of analysis and understanding, it is no wonder that many cognitive scientists are tempted to regard the human brain as a computer or kind of machine, and to see consciousness as a kind of superfluous play of phenomena or appearances produced by the machine. Genuine internality is dismissed and reduced—or claimed to be entirely reducible—to the realm of externally describable cause-effect processes, including even those of the scientific inquirer and observer. With such a view, everything becomes external in principle and in reality, and is to be investigated and comprehended as such. Consciousness has no more reality, in fact, than the illusory, albeit captivating, images projected on the screen of a movie theater. The images are nothing more than the digital processes of a cleverly designed and constructed movie projector. Hence some biologists will speak routinely and unthinkingly of the “machinery” of the cells of the body, including those functioning and interacting in the brain, and any semblance of genuine, irreducible, effective reality associated with conscious awareness and freedom is liable to be dismissed as obsolete fancy or an unnecessary muddying of the water. And in physics, quantum mechanics is a commonly accepted term to describe entities and processes at the basis of matter.

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What I am describing is reductionistic scientism in extremis, and I am not asserting that all scientists do or must buy into it or that all current philosophers subscribe to it. But the idea that everything is a version of some kind of machine is an enticing one in today’s industrial and intellectual world. It gives promise of complete and absolute certainty of understanding and makes such certainty the ideal of all reliable knowledge. Its relevance to the principal theme of this book is that it purports to collapse seeming internality into ultimate externality or outwardness. All searchers for understanding of themselves and the world become machines seeking finally to comprehend and conduct themselves as machines. Real conscious, agential selves drop out of consideration. This prospect may look unbearably sad or alarming for some, but it is welcomed with unqualified enthusiasm in other quarters. The latter’s guiding motto is something like this: “Better to disclaim the reality of the conscious and genuinely free self than to abandon the dream of certain knowledge based wholly on the model of the machine and the mandate of sole reliance on techniques of external observation and inquiry.” The method that gave promise as one extremely useful way of understanding a crucial aspect of reality has become the madness of claiming that outwardness is the only reality, and that the emergent inwardness of life, consciousness, and mind should now be set aside as a distracting illusion. In a delightfully imaginative and readable book, physicist Frank Wilczek explains that the primary properties of matter, according to contemporary physics, are only three: mass, charge, and spin, and that “they are things you can define and measure precisely.” He admits that “the connection of the primary properties—the deep structure of reality—to the everyday appearance of things is quite remote,” but sets that topic aside in order to continue inquiring into the wonders of present-day physics (Wilczek 2021: 73). The precisely definable and measurable things are kept in the forefront of his attention. In one part of his book, however, he does note how differently such creatures as dogs, bats, spiders, bees, birds, and shrimps perceive the world, and he comments: “Many animals inhabit a distinct sensory universe from humans. We share the physical world with them, but we experience it quite differently, not only at the level of intellect, but even at the level of raw perception” (169). But Wilczek speaks here of a shared common world, which he is confident is best described by physics, not of multiple worlds interpreted by many different kinds of organism. The latter may be able to see, hear, or detect aspects of the world we cannot with our unaided senses, but with the proper kinds of instruments, he reasons, we humans can also gain access to their interpreted worlds and thus lay claim to understanding what the real world is like for all of us sentient creatures in its most salient aspects. The multiplicity of differently experienced worlds, whether of humans or other creatures, can thus be

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bracketed and set aside in favor of the one true world being progressively revealed by physics. In this manner, the inner worlds of all creatures, including those of human beings, are assumed to be somehow made subordinate and only passingly contributory to the one true world of physical science. This notion is tacit rather than explicit or pronounced in Wilczek’s intriguing book, but it is an unannounced assumption he seems to have and does not seem to question. For him, physics is admittedly an interpretation of the world, but it is one that is becoming more and more reliable as a progressive disclosure of the one true world—a world to which all inner interpretations are finally beholden and onto which they just project their partial perspectives. These perspectives can be brought together and corrected when necessary by the techniques of scientific investigation. Physics gives us the one true outer world, partly in present actuality and partly in physics’ progressive future. The innumerable worlds of inner experience, to the extent that they open up aspects of the nature of the outer world that are far more accurately and completely disclosed by physical science, are at best, in this view of things, implicit pointers to the one true scientific world. By surely these facts of inner experience are ineliminable ingredients in the world, ingredients without which science itself as a mental investigation would be impossible. Are these facts not themselves to be counted as fundamental in their own fashion in our pictures of the world, whether scientific or otherwise? If so, then all worlds are interpreted worlds, and as such they constitute many such worlds, not just one. I cannot be you in terms of your immediate, firsthand experience, and you cannot be me in that fashion either. And neither of us humans can inhabit the firsthand worlds of the tiger, giraffe, or household pet. The external perspectives of physics are made ultimately possible by the inner experiences, stratagems, cogitations, hypotheses, and experiments of physicists that give rise to them. These inner factors of the world are just as real as the external factors, and they cannot be left behind in any successful account of the nature of the world(s). But these inner factors do not neatly coincide and cohere in the manner of abstract and extremely general physical theories. They remain as brute, unassimilable facts that must also be taken into account. Hence, multiple worlds exist here and now on the earth, not just in supposed alternative universes. Computer scientist and philosopher of science Adam Drozdek puts this point with special cogency and force when he notes that “although different colors can be explained in terms of different light wave frequencies, these frequencies are useless in explaining the greatness of Rembrandt’s art,” and that “different acoustic wave frequencies . . . are of no avail in approaching Bach’s magnificent music” (1994: 143). Drawing in part on the irreducible

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problem of self-reference made perspicuous in Kurt Gödel’s famous two Incompleteness Theorems in the early 1930s (145–46), Drozdek defends in his article the conclusion that “[n]o theory enables explanation of all of reality with all its possible levels. Its scope is always confined to a more or less defined domain and its categories cannot refer meaningfully to what is outside of this domain” (147). What follows from the lines of reasoning here indicated is that “world” is not a master order, concept, or perspective that could exhaustively contain all other orders or perspectives and which they, in their turn, must presuppose. Instead, there is a multiplicity of worldly orders or perspectives, no one of which could ever in its very nature be all-encompassing. The intricately entwined profusion of such worlds renders the idea of a single, all-inclusive world to be incomprehensible, once we take seriously into account the multiplicity of inner and outer dimensions of experienced reality that would have to be incorporated into such a supposed one world. The appeal of the idea of physics as being able to give us a reliable account of the one true, in-itself world is similar to the appeal of the machine model of reality that is the focus of this section. In the machine model, the temptation is irresistible to reduce the whole of reality to some kind of vast machine and thus to something purely external, manipulable, measurable, and certain, with the hope of showing conclusively that all that seems internal and entitled to being regarded as at least equally important and real is in fact only imaginary or, to use the philosophical term, “epiphenomenal.” Quality is thus collapsible into quantity, freedom into efficient causality, and the pliable, open-ended possibilities and wonders of the inner world into the rigid certainties of the scientifically discernable external one. It’s as if the Empire State Building were claimed to be nothing more than the grounding and support of its granite bedrock. Wilczek’s book is about physics, not philosophy, and I do not fault him for not wrestling with this formidable issue. But the philosophical position I allude to here, namely, eliminative materialism, is what I have in mind. The older term for it, interestingly enough, is mechanistic materialism, a fact that brings to the fore the focus and concern of this chapter. Here there is no complementary relationship of the inner and the outer where both are taken with equal seriousness but the absolute dominance of the outer and the ultimate, complete elimination of the inner in favor of the outer. Whatever might seem to be autonomous and ineliminably real in the inner world of everyday thought, choice, and action is in fact and in the final analysis only processes and relationships of the subatomic, elementary “particles” that Wilczek defines as “structureless points where concentrations of mass, charge, and spin reside” (77). In such a vision, it is important to note, the definer and the defined become one and the same.

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But they are not the same. Mind is not the same thing as the aspects of matter considered by physics, even though it is dependent on these aspects for its evolution and its existence. It is something new under the sun. Historically, there is life itself, then conscious life, then the panoplied complexity, splendor, and perplexity of human life. In each case, the outcome is not simply reducible to or identifiable with what preceded it. Each outcome is a reality in its own right. The reductionist view fails to do justice to matter as a restlessly creative ferment capable of giving rise to realities that, once arisen, lie beyond the competency of physics to exhaustively explicate or explain. This creative process reveals, in other words, the limitation of physics as only one interpretation, albeit an undeniable and necessary one, among others. No one-world interpretation such as this can comprehend the awesome complexity and wonder of the interweavings of many world-pictures and the need for these multiple schemes of interpretation to even begin to comprehend the multifaceted character of reality. At one point in his book, Wilczek seems to acknowledge this point, as this statement suggests: Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not. Science contains beautiful ideas, but it does not exhaust beauty. It offers a uniquely fruitful way to understand the physical world, but it is not a complete guide to life. (224)

He acknowledges, in other words, that questions of value such as moral and aesthetic value are not answerable solely by the techniques of science, and that science cannot place limits on our powers and feats of imagination, such as those we find in literature. But he is then quick to assert that the division of experience into internal and external worlds is “superficial,” and that “our best understanding suggests that there is just one world, after all.” His reason for this assertion, which runs counter to the thesis of the present book, is that “[m]atter, deeply understood, has ample room for minds. And so, it can be home to the internal worlds that minds house” (226). If I understand what Wilczek is saying, I think he means that reality is ultimately spatiotemporal and physical, and thus one in this sense. Everything rests, therefore, on something that physics claims competence to analyze, describe, and explain in a fundamental manner, namely, material entities and the systems and processes of such entities. He concludes that “[t]here is both majestic simplicity and strange beauty in this unified view of the world. Within it, we must consider ourselves not as unique objects (‘souls’), outside of the physical world, but rather as coherent, dynamic patterns in matter” [my italics] (226).

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But Wilczek’s making “ample room for minds” as functions of matter should not tempt us to conclude that minds are nothing but matter. They are new kinds of reality that matter, operating in space and time, has brought into being over the face of the earth through eons of time These new kinds of reality are not separate from matter, but they are not reducible, once evolved, into just the material phenomena studied in physics. Not only are new ways of understanding the potencies of matter required and thus new modes of interpretation and understanding, but there is also the requirement to take the radically new creations of matter into account in their own terms and in their own rights. In this way of understanding, no single perspective, whether that of physics or some other outlook, can provide us with a reliable account of a supposedly unitary, single, non-perspectival world. Not only can no one external perspective do this, but all such perspectives would have to brought into account. External perspectives by themselves—or views solely from without, no matter how clever or sophisticated they are or might become—cannot capture or substitute for the irreplaceable reality of inner mind or inner consciousness and its multiple kinds of firsthand awareness and consequent perspectival worlds. The externally observable material bases of experiences of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, aspiration and disappointment, beauty and ugliness, color and sound, and the like are not the same as the internal experiences themselves. “When we see ourselves as patterns of matter, it is natural to draw our circle of kinship very wide indeed,” Wilczek writes (227). But it is also necessary for us to realize that kinship does not imply or require that we all have or could ever have exactly the same perspective (or consequent non-perspective) on a supposed one true world. True kinship means recognition and respect for different perspectives among the kin, and thus for the realization that world is a mixture of partial convergences of perspectives and actual differences of perspectives. The world is therefore both one and many, and neither to the exclusion of the other. NATURAL CAUSES AND HUMAN INTENTIONS An alternative to fascination with the machine model of reality is emergentism. In the emergentist perspective, novelty is a persuasive trait of reality. New kinds of reality emerge over time, and these new things involve probability and chance rather than just strict, deterministic cause-effect relations. Once emerged, the tape cannot be run backward and the seeming new reduced to the precedent old. Life is a new, irreducible thing on the face of the earth, and conscious life is another. In another one of his books, Godfrey-Smith

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describes animal emergentism in this way: “Animal evolution produced a new kind of being, one with new kinds of engagement with the world through the senses and action. It also produced animals who handle their dealings with the world in a way that includes a tacit sense of self.” He goes on to observe, “Evolution, in animals, puts a premium on coherent action, and from a certain point onward, the way to act effectively as a self is to have a sense of oneself, as a unit of that kind” (2020: 258–59). As animal evolution continues to develop, animal consciousness comes gradually into being and, along with it, increasingly vivid firsthand experiences of world-awareness, self-awareness, and self-agency, as animals of newly emergent species interact with their respective worlds. The flow of time itself illustrates a similar kind of emergentism. The present fact occurs in a genuinely new moment and cannot be simply reduced into the past one. Were this not so, there would be no such thing as the flow of time. We could step into the past just as we face toward and move into the future. But we have no way of doing such a thing. The persistent forward march of newness means that the new, whatever form it might take, cannot— try as we may—be collapsed into the past. Furthermore, if nothing is genuinely new, then effects could not be distinguished from causes because there would be nothing different about the effects in their relations to the causes. All machinery, no matter how cleverly designed, would be incapable of doing anything. Turning of the automobile’s wheels would be reducible to the piston’s plunge in the cylinder, and that to the firing of the spark plug, and that to the infusion of the fuel mixture into the cylinder, and so on. Apparent process would dissolve into static pattern, and motion would cease. Mechanical processes take time, and cause-effect relations do as well. Both the flow of time and cause-effect relations require continuity and novelty, not just continuity. If change is impossible, then machines are impossible, and all that we know about the world with reliable confidence and understanding is reduced to a fixed state of affairs. But everywhere we look around us and within us, nothing is truly static and unchangeable. ­New things happen every moment and every day, and they have continued to happen throughout the 13.8 billion years of the present universe, as calculated by today’s scientists. Evolutionary emergence is real, and it creates new kinds of reality. It is not simple repetition of the past. The universe is dynamic rather than static, and conscious beings like ourselves are outcomes of the dynamism of biological evolution, leading from relatively simple forms of life to more complex ones such as octopuses, sperm whales, Caledonia crows, and human beings. Once evolved, humans do not turn back and become chimpanzees, and consciousness does not collapse into the unconscious life-forms that preceded it in evolutionary history. Why, then, should we think that consciousness is some

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kind of mere epiphenomenon, a superfluous gauze of illusion stretched over nothing more than a complex machinery of inexorable cause-effect relationships? Do we not sacrifice understanding rather than enhancing and enlarging it by thinking in this way? What I fundamentally want to say about this matter here is that intentions cannot be reduced to machinelike cause-effect relations. Intentions must rely on such relations; otherwise, intentions could not produce expected effects on one’s body or the world. But if blind, inexorable causality is the whole story, and there is no reality to consciously intended effects that face toward the future and are not just determined by the past—and that are intended within a range of real options instead of being restricted to one externally predictable outcome—then intentionality becomes an illusion, and the supposed agential self capable of freedom of choice does so as well. Conscious beings are something irreducibly new under the sun, and their intentionality has obvious genuine meaning and use. This meaning is, no doubt, partly adaptive. Conscious beings have adaptive resources and resiliencies in relation to the demands of their environments that nonconscious ones do not. But consciousness is also hugely creative in the case of humans, and its powers can also be awesomely destructive, as we have to acknowledge when thinking about the history of human beings on the face of the earth. The inwardness of consciousness is a reality, just as external causal processes are real. Neither can be reduced to the other. Non-emergent, reductive, eliminative materialism, on the one hand, and all-encompassing idealism, on the other, are equally fallacious extremes. The world includes both irreducibly real outward and inward aspects, and the world itself is not a figment or projection of the conscious mind. Minds, whether human or nonhuman, interpret their worlds in multiple ways, but they do not create them. I interpret the inner world of living beings as a function of matter, but the function is something emergently, irreversibly new and real in its own right. And this function has grown apace in its character and capability as more and more complex species of life emerge along divergent and convergent paths of biological evolution. Godfrey-Smith rightly reminds us that experience is not just something to be known about or to be described from without. It is something had firsthand and therefore within a living being. The qualitative features of inward experiences are, therefore, “part of what it is to be the [physical] system being described. Experience is the first-person point of view of a complex living system of a certain kind, not something conjured up by the workings of that system” (2020: 109). Our human species is the outcome of one path of evolutionary development, and the intentionality and consciousness that I take for granted in planning and writing this book is one of the countless demonstrations of my reality as a person and not merely as some kind of automatic machine

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or external thing. Similarly, humans in general are persons capable by their nature of conscious awareness and of intentional purposes, plans, and actions of innumerably different kinds. Two related questions that might be raised in initial consent to my criticism of the machine model of reality or of the attempt to view everything as externally observable and explicable, are these: Does the world as a whole have some kind of comprehensive purpose, or some kind of self-contained telos or goal? And if not, what would be the point of it all, and especially of our lives as human beings? Insofar as I am able to ascertain, the universe has no single overall purpose, nor does it seem to be moving toward some kind of grand purposive culmination or ultimate denouement. Are the world and our lives within the world entirely devoid of purpose or meaning, then? Far from this being the case, the world is full of purposes of innumerably different kinds, at least here on earth and in high probability elsewhere on at least some of the countless planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. Wherever there is life, as Evan Thompson reminds us, there is not only autopoeisis and sense-making but also purposiveness of some kind resulting from these two factors, as living beings interact with their environments from their internal perspectives. Thus, while the universe as such may lack some kind of comprehensive purpose, wherever there is life there are purposes of some sort, and with the evolution of conscious forms of life, purposes can be consciously and routinely envisioned and put into practice. Is there in addition some kind of purpose of the universe as a whole? As I indicated above, there does not seem to be convincing available evidence to persuade me to think that this is so. But there are multiple purposes in the universe. This is undoubtedly the case, at least here on earth and probably elsewhere in the universe, and the presence of felt purposes on earth is not at all confined to the inner lives and the resulting outward actions of human beings. Thus the absence of some kind of overarching purpose in the universe (or, more properly, pluriverse) does not imply the absence of meaningful and amply sustaining purposes available to us humans in the living of our lives. Just as there is no one single, uninterpreted world by the arguments of this book—and need not and cannot be such—so there does not need to be some single cosmic purpose or goal of the universe as a whole to make human life or any kind of life on earth worthwhile. Even if there were such a purpose, it would have to be recognized as meaningful and supportive by conscious creatures here on earth to be acknowledged and welcomed as such. The multiplicity of life purposes here on earth do not need to be endorsed, ratified, or given significance by some all-encompassing, universal purpose.2 At the very least, the two issues—one regarding the presence of purposiveness on earth and the other regarding a putative purpose of the universe—are separate and not necessarily connected with one another.

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EXPLOITATION AND RESPECT When persons are regarded as objects rather than as subjects, they become vulnerable to exploitation. They cease to command the respect due to persons. The same is true when the inner aspects of any sort of living being are callously disregarded, and it is treated indifferently and unfeelingly as an object or thing. When regarded as objects or things, persons or life-forms of any kind can be treated in any way one likes, with no concern for the effects of such treatments on their inner lives of sentience, need, purpose, or feeling. All such considerations are blocked by the attitude that the person or lifeform has no inner life worth attending to or worrying about. This object or thing then has significance only to the extent that it can be put to use in some manner by a would-be exploiter. More fundamentally, the morally reprehensive sense of the term exploiter ceases to have any clear applicability. Mere objects can be used, but not exploited. The exploitative outlook becomes even more egregious as applied to persons when they are seen as members of some kind of faceless group that is undeserving as a whole of any kind of moral treatment or respect but can be used in any way that the exploiter finds appropriate for the exploiter’s own needs, desires, purposes, or whims. The group does not have individual persons perceived as such but only collections of implements analogous to tools in a workshop that can be put to various uses. The institution of slavery, for example, cares little if at all for the distinctive character, interests, needs, and experiences of each enslaved person but only for the various kinds of work the enslaved person can perform to satisfy the interests of the slaveholder. Another example is the brothel, where only the bodies and external appearances of the prostitutes are of interest and value; their inner lives are of little concern. They are like blow-up sex dolls that just happen to be alive. In the brothel, persons become playthings, devices for the gratification of sexual desire. Aside from their different outward appearances, one prostitute is just like another. The unique selfhood of each prostitute is of no concern. Pornography similarly regards and treats persons as things. In the concentration camp, to cite another example, the inmates’ inner lives are given no consideration. They are faceless units of work, nothing more. Or they are condemned to punishment and probable death because they are believed to be not persons but vermin, elements of a despised group claimed to be a grievous offense and danger to members of an accepted group and therefore deemed not worthy of moral treatment or regard. When persons are seen and treated as objects, they are ripe for exploitation. Another example of exploitation where a person is reduced to a manipulable object is the act of rape, where the victim’s body is invaded and put thoughtlessly to use by

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the rapist with no recognition or respect for the personhood, inner life, or freedom of someone whose body and soul are grossly violated. The person being raped has become a kind of sex slave, totally subservient to the person doing the raping. A less extreme example of exploitation but one where violence is done to the livelihood and well-being of persons and their families takes place in the all-too-familiar ways in which owners or managers show little regard for the inner lives of their employees, seeing them as nothing more than means to production, the enhancing of a company’s profits, and its owners’ and investors’ financial enrichment. The workers create the bulk of the productivity of the company but are not seen to be entitled to anything more than the lowest levels of protection, pay, or life enhancement. The employers take pride in their ability to keep wages and benefits at the bare minimum, whether by staying at home or moving overseas, thus leaving the workers at home without jobs. Employees become wage slaves in the process and are heedlessly exploited in the interest of profits. Coldblooded exploitation of workers to the fullest extent is regarded as good business. The workers’ inner lives are of no account. There is also such a thing as self-imposed objectification. It comes into being when persons allow themselves to be seen by themselves as mere objects, existing solely for the sake of acceptance, acclaim, or external rewards of one kind or another. When this self-image is put in place and allowed to prevail, one loses any semblance of control over one’s own life. One’s personal freedom, dignity, and selfhood become overshadowed, mastered, and exploited by the opinions of others. One permits one’s own inner life to be swallowed up into the outlooks, projects, and concerns of other persons. In doing so, a soul is sacrificed for a role, the role—whether of adulation, reward, punishment, condescension, or indifference—defined and attributed to a person by others. One ceases to be a real person and becomes a mere object to be buffeted about, willy-nilly, by the attitudes and uses of others. Of all of the tragedies and evils of exploitation, this one is conspicuously pathetic, because it is so obviously self-imposed and self-inflicted. In making this observation, I do not mean to minimize the difficulties involved in avoiding such a result, especially when the lures to it are as prominent as they are in our time of the glorification of celebrities, the yearning for access to powerful persons, the need to impress the boss in any way possible, and even the willingness to do whatever seems necessary to acquire impressive numbers of Facebook followers. A relentless quest at all costs for public acceptance or acclaim, and a lifelong search for genuine personhood, are not compatible goals. The image of oneself in the eyes of others becomes all-important. The unique potentialities of own’s own inner self are

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undeveloped and left behind. When the inner is sacrificed for the outer, even if willingly, one becomes one’s own victim of objectification and exploitation. Any time we view or treat a person as a mere means to our own selfish uses, we treat that person as an object, exploiting the person as a kind of tool for our own benefit. Something similar happens, in my view, when we treat living beings of any kind in this manner, and especially those with some measure of conscious awareness. All life is deserving of compassion, empathy, and respect for its inwardness, particularly where susceptibility to needless suffering and pain is involved. A particular kind of life’s essential contributions to other forms of life should not be forgotten or disregarded. And all of the conditions conducive to such life are entitled to a similar recognition and regard for their necessary contributions to the flourishing of the living beings of the earth. The observations of this section bring to mind the appalling moral toll of viewing living beings as mechanical objects or cause-effect machines, reducing their inwardness to outwardness, whether in the interest of scientific understanding or for other purposes. The objectification and exploitation of nature, to say nothing of human nature, can all too easily become a route to unconscionable ill treatments and unbearable evils. It has sadly been such throughout human history—both in that history’s deplorable effects on human beings in their relations to one another and in its destructive effects on the life-worlds here on earth. Such effects are becoming glaringly evident in our present time of anthropogenic climate change and impending ecological disaster. The earth’s cries for empathy and mercy tend sadly to fall on deaf ears when its nonhuman denizens are viewed as mere objects and exploited as such. THE MIRACLE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS I need first to clarify my use of the term miracle in the heading of this section. I do not mean anything like a particular act of God or some other kind of supernatural being that interrupts the regular, lawlike processes of nature to produce some kind of highly unusual effect. I mean rather to call attention to the awe-inspiring, wonderful aspects of the world in which we humans live day-to-day. I use the term in the sense of its derivation from the Latin verb miror, meaning “wonder at, be amazed at, admire.” In doing so, I mean to call attention to our astonishing capability as humans of having the gifts of consciousness, self-awareness, and agential freedom. No matter how routinely available these gifts may appear, when we stop to think about our possession of them we cannot help but be amazed, as I shall endeavor to make evident in this section.

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To think of ourselves as complex machines, no matter how scientifically astute and informed this position might appear to be, is in fact a contradiction because machines are automata and not capable of the acts of thinking that are routine among humans. An automobile, for example, is self-moving, as its name implies. But it is not autonomous in the human sense of that term. In an act of thinking, moreover, we show ourselves to be conscious. We cannot reflect on or deny our consciousness without in that very act affirming it. It would be folly for any one of us to deny consciousness to other human beings because to do so would be to make oneself the sole exception in this prominent and highly conspicuous respect to all of the rest of humanity— hardly a plausible or defensible point of view—especially so if one human should try to convince other humans that the point of view is correct. Seeking to convince others of some point of view, theory, or belief is to assume that that those others are conscious in the sense of having the capability to be convinced, that is, freely to weigh in the balance and affirm or reject the cogency of the proposal for belief. The amazing contributions of consciousness are many, but I want to indicate some of them here by way of briefly surveying, summarizing, and bringing to the fore the miracle of consciousness—a miracle we might tend otherwise to overlook or take for granted. Out-of-the-ordinary occurrences can grab our attention in ways that ordinary features of everyday life are not as likely to do, but I submit that a real miracle is exhibited in the stupendous gift of life itself and in our conscious capabilities as living beings. These capabilities include the following: awareness of the surrounding world; awareness of oneself as an individual person; ability to reason; freedom to perform intentional acts; and regular use of the creative resources and achievements of language. We would have no recognition of the sublimities and wonders of our world if we were not conscious beings with gifts of sensation, feeling, acknowledgment, admiration, and appropriation. Consciousness opens the world to our basic needs and uses as living beings and helps us in countless ways to adapt to the world successfully. But it also makes possible mindful appreciation for the world’s stunning grandeur and beauty, its incredible diversity of living creatures, its life-creating and sustaining powers, its evocative complexities and mysteries, and its role as a home for the human spirit in interdependent community with the other creatures of earth. Precisely how the human body is able to produce, support, and sustain the exquisite clarity of conscious awareness in humans is not well understood today, but the fact of it is presupposed in all attempts to make inroads on such an explanation. Everything we customarily rely on and purport to understand about the challenges and wonders of the outer world is made possible for us by the astounding inner miracle of our consciousness.

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Consciousness also grants us awareness of ourselves as distinctive persons with memories, reveries, reflections, outlooks, inclinations, gifts—as well as prospects, challenges, and opportunities—not available in a replicable, firsthand manner to any other person. It is amazing, when you think about it, that each of us is a distinctive personal self that can attend to, contemplate, and interact with its own self, the first or meta-self somehow including the second one as a focus of interest and concern. The first self or sphere of consciousness in general includes the second self among its other focuses of actual or possible attention at any given time. The ancient Delphic injunction “know thyself” (gnothi seauton) is made possible by consciousness, especially by the individual conscious self’s extraordinary ability to reflect upon and seek to understand its potentialities for developing virtues of character and behavior, and to work throughout life to improve itself in this manner. In so doing, the injunction warns us in no uncertain terms to avoid vacuous lives of unreflective complacency and sheer other-directedness. It insists that we endeavor throughout our lives to study, recognize, and draw on our unique capacities for self-awareness and self-realization. A flourishing life of genuine self-realization and self-contribution cannot be put on automatic pilot. It must be intentional and persistent, not allowed to lapse into thoughtless self-neglect. I am a person of singular memories, experiences, and expectations built up over the years of my life, even as you and every other person is. When I am driving on a busy street in town, I sometimes marvel at the fact that each oncoming or passing car that comes into my view has individual persons in it with interests, memories, aspirations, frustrations, regrets, sorrows, relationships, and the like that are similar to my own but are also uniquely their own in firsthand quality and feel—constituting for each of them continuing awareness of their own unique selves. No one else has my memories in the precise manner in which I have them. These memories help to constitute and make available to me who I am and have become as a person. I have acquired particular skills, made particular mistakes, had particular aspirations, and experienced successes and failures that are uniquely experienced by me. All of these things help to constitute who I am as a person today and what I am capable of in the way of success and failure at this time of my life— including my successes and failures of coming to know who I am, what I am capable of, and what I can still contribute to others and to the world. It would be a shame to waste the finite, time-bounded gift of consciousness and not put it to constant use in exploring and seeking to maximize the capabilities it confers on each of us and invites us to develop for the sake of our own self-realization and for what we can do on behalf of others. Each human life is analogous to a work of art in the sense of converting the raw materials of its distinctive potentialities into something of recognizable worth, not only to

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oneself but to others. This worth need not be something of widespread public acclaim. It need only be the worth of being truly oneself and continuing conscientiously to cultivate one’s gifts as a person, so as to be a responsible participant in and contributor to one’s family, friendships, associates, community, and world. The reasoning ability of humans, and of nonhuman beings with consciousness in some degree, is another indication of its wondrous, miraculous character. We humans do not need to rely uncritically on the opinions or putative authority of other people. We are able to think and reason for ourselves. We can do so on the basis of resources given to us by our acculturation, but as acculturated, we also have latitude for introducing insights, critical reflections, and modes of behavior of our own, and that way possibly contributing to the understanding and awareness of others, or even in some way or ways to the ever-accumulating treasure cove of culture itself. Our reasoning ability enables us to envision problems and find satisfying solutions to them, arrive at new levels of understanding, critically analyze and advance our self-development, and be of significant help to others in these ways. The enterprise of formal education depends basically on the reasoning ability, not only of well-educated teachers, but also on the rational capabilities of students responding to their encouragement and teaching. Reasoning ability is critical to the sciences and the humanities. It lies behind all cultural advances, including those of technology, the arts, morality, social and political institutions, religion, and the sciences. There would be no such advances apart from the miracle of reasoning. Were we not conscious, we could not reason, and were we not rational beings, we could not learn in the true sense of learn, that is, thinking critically and having the perception to unlearn, when necessary. Without consciousness, there would be no such thing as culture in the sense of something consciously accomplished, developed, and passed along through the generations—for the benefit of all. As humans, we are not only aware of ourselves, our fellow humans, and the world around us, with its other living creatures. We are also, as just indicated, capable of reflecting, reasoning, and drawing our own conclusions about these matters. But this capability presupposes another characteristic of the miracle of consciousness, its gift of freedom. This gift is not only the ability to choose to think and reason in an intentional manner. It is also the ability to choose to act in light of predictable outcomes of our deliberations, to put our thoughts into practice and enable them to have effects on the world beyond ourselves. With freedom, we can make the inner world of consciousness have consequences for the outer world and do so with conscious intention and expectation. Despite the defenders of causal determinism, for whom so-called freedom is said to be nothing more than our being the nexus of causal factors outside

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our personal control, our characters as selves with the gift of consciousness and with genuine capability to make a difference with self-directed intentionality and freedom, seem palpably evident. It is so even when proponents of the opposing view try to convince others of its falsity. In doing so, they expose their own reasoning to the charge of being illusory. A mere nexus of causes cannot be a reasoning being in the commonly assumed sense of reasoning, which even the most tenacious and convinced defenders of causal determinism cannot help taking for granted in their efforts to convince others of this theory’s truth. The inner world of the defender must be genuinely agential and rise principally and effectively from the defender’s own conscious, freely arrived-at, and freely directed intentions. And the defender must assume similar abilities in the conscious inwardness of others, as I argued earlier. So once again, consciousness is not an ineffectual stream of phenomenal appearances, a kind of movie theater of the mind. Genuine freedom to think, intend, and act is an indispensable part of the miracle of the nature of consciousness. It is the capability and property of persons, not machines. Finally, I want to call attention to language as both the creation of consciousness and its invaluable instrument and enabler. The miracle of consciousness would not only be less impressive without the creation of language, its subsequent developments, and its extensive uses. I would not be able even to talk about it and discuss it here if I had no linguistic capability. And these words would be nothing more than meaningless black marks on the page for you, the reader. Wherever there is consciousness in the evolution of life-forms, language—at least in the form of a descriptive, contemplative, communicating symbolic system of some sort—is not far behind. In the case of human beings, language has become a fine-tuned instrument of reflection, record-keeping, artistic expression, religious sensibility, moral instruction, scientific theorizing, person-to-person communication, and cultural transmission. We humans are immersed in a sea of culture, an environment that our languages have had a fundamental role in creating, preserving, and opening to ongoing individual and collective criticism and improvement. Awareness of the surrounding world; awareness of and ability to contribute to the development of one’s distinctive selfhood; the ability to reason intentionally and to good effect; the freedom to think, plan, and act, individually or in company with others; and the development and extensive uses of the communicative, critical, and creative resources of language—all of these facts of human existence are testaments to the irreplaceable importance and miraculous character of the inner realm of consciousness. There would be no such thing as life, to say nothing of conscious life, apart from the creative, sustaining power of the external world. But life would also be nonexistent without its essential interiority of autopoeisis, sense-making, and purpose. And their conscious life imparts immeasurable components of

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challenge, meaning, enjoyment, purpose, and value to humans and to their experiences of the outward world. There would be no sense of such things apart from the evolutionary emergence of their inward awareness. Our lives as humans would be abysmally poor without consciousness, but we would be sadly unaware of our abject poverty in its absence. CONCLUSION I discussed in this chapter the seductive allure of the machine model of all of reality, where it is hoped and claimed that all of existence is capable, in principle, of being comprehended in a purely objective, machinelike manner. This machine model purports to offer a clarity of objective intelligibility and explanation that can encompass and make unnecessary any sort of appeal to the inwardness of mind and consciousness. It sets before us the bizarre idea of conscious analysis bent on eliminating even itself by entirely reducing its inner character, traits, and capabilities to those of the outer world. But how could it intentionally succeed in eliminating itself as consciously aware, competent, and free without blatant self-contradiction? I contend that it cannot. However seductive or alluring the machine model of all of reality may appear to be, with its promise of objectifying, routinizing, and exhaustively accounting for everything in existence, it is patently inadequate as a way of arriving at complete understanding not only of our conscious selves but of the world of ceaselessly remarkable evolutionary changes and ongoing creative transformations from which our species and all other species of life have emerged. The machine model of analysis and explanation is of undoubted value in many contexts, and it continues to have important usefulness for the natural sciences. But it is not all-comprehending or capable of doing justice to the totality of ourselves and our world—including explaining those who seek by its means for better understanding of ourselves and our world. Another way of putting this crucial point is that human intentions cannot be reduced in their totality to external causes. The roles of surprise, novelty, and unpredictability cannot be ignored, either in an evolving universe, the nature of time, or the relations of causes and effects. Its effective presence in human intentionality and acts of freedom should not, therefore, be rejected in the name of an alleged reality in which they are said to be impossible and nonexistent. Free actions take place within causal contexts and are conditioned in significant degree by those contexts, but they are not wholly determined by them. Nor can they be wholly explained on their basis. There is an inwardness of freedom that cannot be successfully accounted for by the outwardness of putatively objective causal analyses and explanations.

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To reduce human beings to objects, whether by assumption, investigation, or treatment, is to make them vulnerable to exploitation and to deny them respect for their unique personhood and self-awareness and their distinct inward lives of memories, frustrations, regrets, hopes, strivings, relationships, and the like. It is to convert them from real persons into manipulable things, and as such, tools for exploitation. I cited as examples of such exploitation concentration camps, brothels, rape, pornography, businesses where the profit motive trumps and eclipses humane treatments of workers, and even the acts of self-objectification and self-exploitation where one allows the inestimable integrity and value of one’s inner selfhood to be routinely ignored and submerged by the attitudes, expectations, and treatments of others. The final main topic I brought under discussion in the chapter is the miracle of human consciousness, an everyday and yet astounding miracle that we unfortunately allow to become so taken-for-granted that we are in danger of forgetting. As I pointed out, this miracle includes such gifts as awareness of the splendors of the surrounding world; awareness of oneself by oneself—an extremely amazing even if commonplace capability; an ability to reason and with reason to examine one’s course of life in continuing thoughtful fashion, as well as to critically assess the claims of others; the freedom to put into action the conclusions of one’s rational thoughts and observations; and the ability to make rational uses of the resources of language for one’s own sake and the sake of others. All of these capabilities are the bestowals of consciousness and give convincing evidence of its wondrous character. We live in a miraculous world, and with consciousness can become increasingly aware of all that is contained within it. This includes the miracle of our individual conscious inwardness that, among many other things, allows us to interpret the world and its multiple creations, including its other living beings, human and nonhuman. A highly significant and ineliminable part of these creations is emergence of the inner dimensions of all forms of earthly life and the accompanying interpretative responses of these inner dimensions to the particular life-forms’ respective environments. All such interpretative responses constitute multiple ways of world-making. NOTES 1. Carl Safina discusses ways in which sperm whales can come to the rescue of their comrades and the youngsters of their groups. He describes how giant sperm whale males have attacked, damaged, and even sunk large whaling ships as the ships proceed brutally to harpoon their companions. He also recounts how sperm whales can band together in a kind of circular phalanx to defend themselves against vicious attacks by killer whales, each whale endangering its life in the process, and some

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being viciously snatched out of the circle by the killer whales. See the end of chapter four and the early part of chapter five in Safina’s engaging book Becoming Wild. 2. My personal religious outlook as an adherent and proponent of religious naturalism does not require that I endorse the idea of a universal cosmic purpose in order to find the immanent purposes of life-forms in nature, including my own, to be valuable, important, and meaningful.

Chapter Six

Inwardness and Religion

There is much that is outward and externally observable and knowable about religion. For example, there are revered teachers, cherished institutions, sacred scriptures and traditions, time-honored creeds and rituals, directed ways of living in the world, and the like. These outward features are undeniably important, but they do not strike to the heart of religion as lived by earnest, deeply committed religious persons, including but not restricted to its most venerated founders and teachers. These outward expressions and manifestations of religion are its husk, necessary for its transmission from generation to generation. But they are not its vital seed or core. The source of its ongoing genuine life and authentic passage, development, and renewal through time is something profoundly inward, not outward. This source is the lively faiths, lifelong soul-searchings, and resolutely committed ways of life of its adherents. Most fundamentally, religion requires feeling, thinking, intentionality, striving, patience, trust, and conviction of the most alert, sensitive, and demanding kind. Its heart is in receptive, earnestly cultivated conscious awareness, not just in outward practice. When authentic, the practices of religion will be deeply informed, pervaded, and motivated by this inner spirit and commitment, this earnest yearning for a pure heart of devotion to and continuing transformation by the sacred, however the sacred is conceived by a particular kind of religious faith and tradition. “You will know them by their fruits,” Jesus says of false prophets, thereby implying that the same test can be successfully applied to the true prophets, teachers, or professors of a religious faith (Matthew 7: 16). And the Epistle of James flatly claims, “Faith by itself, if it has no works is dead” (James 2:17).1 Such verses of the Christian New Testament might be interpreted as putting primary or even exclusive emphasis on outer lives of service and good works as the central character and meaning of the religious life. Religion, in other words, is fundamentally a kind of ethics. But the Epistle of James 111

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avoids this misleading impression when it says of Abraham offering his son on the altar in obedience to a divine command, his “faith was active along with his works, and completed by [his] works” (2:22). The key word here is completed (Greek: eteleiōthē), which also means “brought to fulfillment, perfection, maturity”—in other words, brought into an essential fullness of outward expression. Faith, as the inward acts and dispositions of Abraham’s deeply religious personal character and commitment—as taken for granted by James—is manifested in his outward actions. His fruits have roots, and the latter are inward. Faith without works is dead because there is no outward manifestation or expression of faith’s real presence in the heart. But works, by the same token, have no genuine religious character without their basis in authentic religious faith. Science’s valuable focus on the externally observable, predictable, and testable is complemented by religion’s principal focus on an internal life of searching inquiry into and resolute devotion to sacred depths and powers as vital sources of deeds of kindness, helpfulness, and justice it is called upon to exemplify and inspire in the world. Religion’s inner life is also a welcome source of the passion for beauty, wonder, hope, and love it has shown itself to be capable of evoking—at least when at its best—in the peoples of the world. Outward assent to religious beliefs, however loudly and impressively professed and proclaimed in public, is religiously dead if it is uninformed, uncommitted, and insincere—bereft of striving for ever-growing comprehension and enactment of the personal meaning and demand of the beliefs—thus failing to give expression to a deeply based religious faith. Outward profession and recitation cannot take the place of inward conviction. Secular people may perform works similar to those of people with strong religious commitment. But the former’s works lack religious identity or significance because they do not explicitly and intentionally grow out of the stance of religious faith. This is not to say that their works lack significance or importance, or that they are not rooted in some meaningful type of secular faith. It is only to say that they are not distinctively religious in their rootage. Thus, the outward and the inward are inseparably conjoined in genuine religion. Neither real religious faith nor authentic religious actions can be rightly be said to exist apart from the other. They are two sides of the same coin. The same is no doubt true of honest secular faith too, but my emphasis in this chapter, as its title indicates, is on the crucial importance of unrelenting inward consciousness, intentionality, preparation, and development of personal character in religion. Out of these factors, and only out of them, do religious works find authentic outward expression as such. I know of no long-established religious tradition that would take issue with these assertions.

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So-called religious professions or actions, taken apart from the radical inwardness of authentic religious faith, are like electric lights disconnected from a power source or kerosene lamps with dry wicks and depleted fuel. They continue to be observable and maybe even admirable objects, but they cast no religious light. Works without the profound inspiration and motivation of a continuously cultivated inward mindfulness, conviction, commitment, and faith can also be compared to cleverly designed artificial flowers. They may look impressively real on the outside, but they have no inner life of ongoing nourishment, refreshment, and development. They are, as the Epistle of James states, religiously dead. What is true of faith without works is also true of works without faith. Neither has deeply meaningful religious character apart from the other. When Jesus uses the metaphor of “white-washed tombs,” resplendent on the outside but containing gruesome decayed flesh, grimacing skulls, and lifeless bones on the inside, he speaks to the same point. Lives of hypocritical religious ostentation are, like these tombs, dead on the inside, however alive they may appear to be on the outside (Matthew 23:27). He speaks in similar fashion, and most memorably, in the Sermon on the Mount when he contrasts various kinds of overt action with inner motivation and places heavy weight on the essential primacy of the latter (Matthew 5:21–49). External observances cannot substitute for an inward life of fervently contemplated, consciously examined, and ever-deepening religious faith. The inner life of intense meditation and soul-searching, of religious faith always seeking understanding, wisdom, and ongoing development of habits of outlook and practice as necessary routes to more effective ways of daily living the truths of faith, is essential to faith’s true nature. Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh cites the prayers of Christian theists and the meditative practices of Buddhists, and notes in this way their necessary rootage in a meticulously cultivated mental discipline. Christians emphasize Prayer of the Heart, and Buddhists speak about one-pointed mind (cittasekagata). Christians and Buddhists both realize that without concentration, without abandoning distracting thoughts, prayer and meditation will not bear fruit. Concentration and devotion bring calm, peace, stability, and comfort to both Buddhists and Christians. If farmers use tools to cultivate their land, practitioners use prayer and meditation to cultivate their consciousness. The fruits and flowers of the practice spring forth from the soil of the mind. 1995:167)

The laudable character of an outward religious life, in other words, can only be attained through constant attention to its inner source of prayer and/or meditation. There are common characteristics of this rigorous inner discipline

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in the two religious traditions, the most telling for our purposes here being insistence on the crucial importance of the development of inward consciousness, understanding, and dedication for the sustenance and continuing growth of religious life. But there is also an essential difference between the two traditions. Christians have contemplative practices, as do Buddhists. But the Christian practices are principally forms of prayers to and prayerful reliance on a personal God for essential guidance and support. And the faith of Christians is based on what they believe the living God graciously reveals and wills to make known to them throughout human history. Buddhists do not typically pray to Buddha. Through highly refined and increasingly demanding levels of contemplative or meditative practice handed down from ancient times and based on the Buddha’s dharma or teaching, they seek to follow the Buddha’s path to liberation. Their procession on this path is one of faithful emulation of the Buddha’s life and thought, while the Christian seeks for salvation granted by the mercy and grace of communion with a personal God. Christians pray to God and seek an ever-deepening personal relationship with God, while Buddhists meditate on the Buddha’s teachings and example in their earnest search for religious enlightenment and transformation. This difference between theistic (including polytheistic as well as monotheistic) and nontheistic religious traditions runs through the history of religions in general, and it exhibits a fundamental contrast—despite their similarities in many other respects—in their respective stresses on the inner life of religious faith. They both value inwardness above all else but do so in different ways. I want now to discuss and illustrate this fundamental difference in greater detail. I begin with theistic religion and will then move to discussion of a nontheistic one, with attention in both cases to their respective robust emphases on the critical importance of inward and intensely firsthand religious consciousness and stances of faith. INWARDNESS AND THEISTIC RELIGIONS Much of what I will have to say in this section applies to polytheistic as well as monotheistic religions. It applies in large measure to the “way of devotion” (bhakti yoga) tradition of worshiping and serving various gods or goddesses in Hinduism, for example. But I shall focus here on the monotheism of Judaism to illustrate monotheism’s distinctive type of stress on the religious inwardness of heart and mind. Giving expression to his ardent faith as a Jew living in ancient times, the Psalmist of the Tanakh2 or Hebrew Bible exclaims,

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I have called with my whole heart; answer me, O Lord; I will keep Thy statutes. I have called Thee, save me, And I will observe Thy testimonies. I rose early at dawn, and cried; I hoped in Thy word. Mine eyes forestalled the night-watches, That I might meditate in Thy word. Hear my voice according unto Thy lovingkindness; Quicken me, O Lord, as Thou art wont. (Psalm 119:145–149)

There are three things to note about this passage, which I have quoted from the 1917 translation of the Hebrew Bible endorsed by the Jewish Publication Society of America and reprinted in 1952. The first one is that the passage indicates the Psalmist’s persistent life of prayer to God. The second is that it speaks of his constant meditation on the statues, testimonies, and revelatory “word” granted to the covenanted Jewish people by God. The third is that it looks to the loving-kindness of God for enriching the Psalmist’s religious understanding, strengthening his commitment, and assuring his salvation. He also speaks of focused meditation on the divine word, but it is mediation guided by and dependent on the inspiration and aid of his personal, ever-present Creator. So the emphasis throughout the passage is on the succor and strength granted to the Psalmist by God. It is the divinely guided training and strengthening of the dispositions of his inner heart that the Psalmist relies upon to insure his outer faithfulness to God’s commandments that were revealed aforetime to God’s people (see verses 151–152). His dependence on God is wholehearted and unqualified. No thought is given to the possibility of salvation, personal transformation, or exemplary works based solely on the Psalmist’s own effort or unaided practice. The inner world of prayer and meditation is prior to the outer world of good works, but both are critically dependent, in their turn, on continuing divine inspiration, direction, and support. In another Psalm, we find this anxious question and its prompt answer: I will lift mine eyes to the mountains: From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. (121:1–2)

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For the devoted theist of the Jewish Bible, the crucial inner faith of the religious person is wholly dependent on the presence and help of the living God. Meditation has little religious point or use if it does not have the continuing form of prayerful search for saving obedience to and relation with the personal God of the scriptures, in the theist’s ongoing religious life. When the Psalmist in perhaps the most familiar section of the Book of Psalms declares, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (23:1), he compares himself to a sheep in constant need of God’s guidance and protection, and of the continuing restoration of his soul. He will “fear no evil” even in “the valley of the shadow of death,” for God is always with him, comforting him and caring for him with generous compassion and concern (23:4). Clearly, at the heart of his religious life is this inward assurance of the presence of God and his constant endeavor to live in close communion with God. In another part of the Jewish Bible, the Book of Exodus, chapter 3, we read of Moses’s first encounter with God. He comes onto a bush that is mysteriously aflame, and out of the bush God speaks, warning him to remove his sandals, for he is on holy ground. God informs him that he, Moses, has been chosen to lead the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt. Moses, taken quite aback, asks what he should tell his fellow Jews is the name of this divine presence so suddenly and unexpectedly revealed to him. God replies, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). This statement sounds quite enigmatic until we reflect on the words “I am.” The words mean above all else that God is an “I,” a Subject or Person—albeit of vastly different order of existence from humans—with whom it is possible to come into relation as human subjects or other kinds of “I.”3 In other words, the inwardness of God’s life can be shared with the inward lives of human beings. God wills this sharing and invites humans into it. The passage also implies that God first searches for us in order that we might search for God. God encounters us before we encounter God. We humans are beloved subjects in the eyes of God, not manipulable objects. God wants to have person-to-person relations with us, despite the fearsome gravity and awesome majesty of God’s person. The inwardness of God’s person, as communicated throughout the Jewish Bible, makes contact with the inwardness of human persons when they respond to God’s initiatives in prayerful love and thankful obedience. God is no mere abstract idea, but a holy presence and living person. The covenant God establishes long before Moses’s time with Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 17) marks the beginning of this relationship between God and God’s people the Jews, according to the Bible. It is an uncanny experience for Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, one suffused with the overwhelming authority and gracious instruction of the one true God. Abraham falls on his face before God with awesome dread and submissive reverence (Genesis

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17:3). The anxious yearning for and grateful assurance of God’s presence and guidance in the inner depths of the human spirit are trademarks of monotheistic religion in all of its forms. INWARDNESS AND NONTHEISTIC RELIGIONS I move now from the monotheistic version of theistic religion, as represented in Judaism, to the version of religion I shall call meditative. There are many forms of religion that are principally meditative in their approaches to religious truth and to the transformative promise and power of religious faith. The Hinduism of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta and the Daoism of Laozi’s Daode Jing are examples, neither of which is theistic. But to illustrate this meditative, nontheistic kind of religion, I shall draw from a collection of texts from the Pāli Canon of Buddhism as introduced and translated by the American scholar and Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. In the Buddhism of these texts, there is no overarching personal Creator of the universe who reaches out for dialogue and companionship with humans, loving them and inspiring them to live with inner heart and disposition in accordance with the Creator’s holy purpose and will. Instead, there is a rigorous path of intensely inward meditative practice that, following the practice of the Buddha himself, is said to lead to the ultimate goal of nirvana.4 Nirvana is a state in which one is finally released from all suffering or dukkha; from erroneous belief in a substantial self; from delusionary, futile focus on that unreal self; from all the misplaced craving and desiring that give rise to and sustain suffering; from the debilitating consequences of karma or the weight of destructive past bad attitudes and actions; and from samsara, the endless recycling from life to life by the relentless wheel of being and becoming. When nirvana is finally attained, then after the death of a liberated arahant or fully enlightened Buddhist, there is no more rebirth. To experience nirvana is finally to arrive at an inviolable state of perfect focus, peace, and joy that enables one to engage selflessly and effectively in the affairs of the world. By opening one to a fullness of life, nirvana is not so much a form of escape from life as one of liberation from barriers that stand in the way of that fullness. This is moksha or vimukti: salvation in the Buddhist sense of the term. And an essential regimen of inner-directed meditational practices provides the path to its realization. These meditational practices are intended to follow the Buddha’s own path toward nirvana and thus to emulate his life and teachings. The Buddha is not to be worshiped in the way that the God of monotheism or the gods and goddesses of polytheism are. Instead, his life is to be faithfully imitated so as ultimately to realize the goal to which he successfully

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devoted his own life. His example and his detailed teachings, replete with helpful metaphors and analogies, lay out the route to that kind of entirely liberated life. That route is primarily one of lifelong meditative practice, moving into deeper and deeper states of liberating awareness. In fact, achievement of the route’s arduous goal will usually take a series of many previous lives, each reincarnated into successively deeper stages of preparation, development, and awareness. Finally, and most interestingly for the theme of this book, what Buddhism regards as the illusion of an inner substantial self is left behind, and the world of ordinary sensate awareness and conscious assumption and outlook is transcended along with it. So the life of profound, extremely demanding meditational practice is meant to culminate in the practitioner’s final grasp of the practitioner’s own selflessness (anatman). It is one thing to be committed intellectually to the self’s nonexistence. It is quite another to finally experience it and come to understand it in that way. Not only is there no such thing as a self, thought to underlie the various fleeting forms and elements of ordinary consciousness, but there also is ultimately no substantial, enduring world either. The arahant experiences and comes completely to terms with the realization that there is no permanence to anything, whether of self or world. Hence, both self and world, the inner and the outer, are dissolved into five skandhas, aggregates, bundles, or heaps with no substantial existence lying behind them or giving unity to them.5 To yearn for the permanent or to seek for it anywhere, whether in oneself, in a presumably substantial external world, or in a supposed everlasting or eternal God, is to move in the opposite direction from the goal of Buddhist practice. Still, there is the practitioner and the goal toward which the practitioner proceeds by means of the stages of meditational realization. So this ultimately nonself practitioner becomes the “inner” for our purposes here, the inner who struggles through strenuous meditational discipline for liberation from the delusion of permanent, substantial being—including, finally, from the crippling delusion of its own substantial self. The Pāli text to which I will refer for its succinct and helpful explication of Buddhist meditational practice is the Sattipathāna Sutta selection in Bikkhu Bodhi’s anthology (2005: 281–290). Bodhi explains that Sattipathāna can best be translated as “establishment of mindfulness” (261–62), so this text analyzes the key concept of mindfulness in Buddhism, showing us four basic focuses or domains essential to its practice and attainment. These are body, feelings, states of mind, and phenomena. This brief text makes unmistakably evident the arduousness and complexity of the Buddhist meditational path toward final liberation or enlightenment. It says in summary of its content, “this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the passing away of pain and dejection, for the

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attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibbana [Nirvana]—namely, the four establishments of mindfulness” (290). The first focus or domain discussed in the selection is body in its relation to meditational or mindful practice. By meditating on the breath, the practitioner can continue to be reminded of the body’s transitory nature—its arising and its ultimate vanishing, and in this way, of the transitory nature of all of the physical things in the world. In realizing this, the practitioner sees the futility of attachment or clinging to any of the physical things of the world. Such awareness is strengthened by regular attendance to such things as walking, looking, bending and stretching, the wearing of robes, eating, drinking, urinating, falling asleep, talking, keeping silent, and the like. All such bodily functions are reminders of the ever-changing, dependent, fragile character of the body and, by extension, of all of the physical things of the world. Meditating on them in a sustained and disciplined manner, the practitioner becomes increasingly aware of how futile it is to look to them for salvation. This awareness is further advanced by contemplating the ugliness of the body, full of many disgusting components (e.g., fat, feces, urine, phlegm, bile, pus, blood, spittle, snot, etc.). In this way, the taunting seductiveness of bodily lusts, attractions, and preoccupations can be gradually resisted and set aside. Furthermore, by meditating on corpses, the practitioner can become increasingly alert to the arising and vanishing of the body, and therefore of its undependability as a basis of any kind in the search for liberation. Seeing through the gnawing seductions and lures of the body and of bodily existence requires intense and unceasing meditation, with constant inspiration by the exemplary life of the Buddha and his dharma. The second focus is on feeling. Both carnal and spiritual feelings partake of transitoriness and undependability similar to that of the body and other physical things. This is true whether the feelings are those of pleasure or pain, or of the absence of pleasure or pain. There is no ultimate value in clinging to their continual arising and vanishing. Apart from the discipline of concentrated meditation, they will continue to distract and waylay persons searching for liberation. The third focus of contemplation or meditation is on mind. Here the devoted practitioner becomes increasingly aware of how fleeting, without proper meditational training, are times of hatred and those without hatred, of delusion without delusion, of depression without exaltation, of distraction without concentration, and so forth. The practitioner also comes to understand the fundamental and appalling difference between an unliberated mind and one that can become truly liberated, and thus to aim constantly for the destination of the latter, avoiding the byways and pitfalls of the former, while traveling on the meditative path. To change the metaphor, a wondrous jewel lies buried deep within the mind, but it can be unearthed only by arduous,

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rigorously devoted, and lifetime meditational practice. The clinging attachments of materiality, feeling, and mind must be overcome. The fourth focus is on what are called the phenomena. These include hindrances to progressive meditational practice such as sensual desire, ill will, dullness, remorse, and doubt. They also include clinging to one or more of the five aggregates, bundles, or skandhas identified in note 5 below. Three other factors are included in this fourth focus as well. But the fifth or final one of these is most important, because it encapsulates the entire saving message of Buddhism. This focus is on the Four Noble Truths: the prevalence of suffering, the origin of suffering, the possibility of the cessation of suffering, and the path to the cessation of suffering. Suffering is tragically everywhere in the world. Its origin is in distractive, debilitating, destructive, attachments or cravings for the transitory, insubstantial things of this world, including the ultimately insubstantial, nonexistent self. Suffering is not inevitable or inviolable; it can be overcome. It can be overcome by meticulous meditational discipline that follows the example and teaching of the Buddha. Here, then, is the Buddhist religion’s basic contrast with theistic religion. The Buddhist one holds out the prospect of salvation or liberation by means of meditational practice. The theistic one finds salvation in worship and service of a god, goddess, or gods. In the first, there is no ultimate human or divine person: personhood in both cases is left behind. In the second, there is the hope of ultimate, saving communion of human persons with a personal divine being or beings. The difference between the two is the path of meditation, in the first instance, and the path of worship, in the second. The internal approach of meditation, in the case of Buddhism, culminates, paradoxically, with final elimination of the distinction between the inner and the outer, both disclosed as having no substantial being. Meditation, like the snake eating its tail, having served its purpose, brings an end to belief in the delusionary existence of the meditating self. This side of samsara, or the wheel of being and becoming, the illusory self continues its reincarnationary entrapments, but once free of the wheel, it returns no more. Where has it gone, then? The Buddha refused to answer or discuss this question, reminding his interrogators that the point of Buddhism lies in its practical meditational path, not in dwelling on such speculative questions. The story of the man wounded by a poisoned arrow makes this point vividly. We need to remove the arrow promptly from the man writhing in pain and attend to his wound, not waste time allowing him to worry about the arrow’s composition, the nature of the poison, or the identity of the one who shot the arrow into him. We need to concentrate on the urgent issue of our liberation in practical fashion, because we all suffer grievously. We do not have time or depth of knowledge to address such speculative questions, and we have

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no need to do so.6 Thus Buddhism leaves our speculative questions about its teachings in abeyance, because they serve only to distract us from its central, entirely practical message. OUTER LIVES OF THEISTS AND MEDITATIONALISTS Up to this point, I have given primary stress to the inner lives of theists and of those whose religions focus on meditational practices instead of the worship of a god, goddess, gods, or goddesses in their search for salvation. But I now want to discuss the outer lives of adherents to these two basic kinds of religion. I shall focus again on Jewish monotheism’s prayerful commitment to God and on the Buddhist reliance on the discipline of meditation as examples of these two kinds of religious faith in order to do so. In other words, what sorts of outward lives in the world do these two traditions enjoin on their followers? And how do these two modes of outward life reflect the inner preparations and dispositions of heart and mind that the two religions mandate? I begin with the outward expressions of Jewish monotheism. The most encompassing of these expressions is acknowledgment of God as the one and only God, as the Creator of heaven and earth, and as the maker of the sacred covenant with the Jewish people. This acknowledgment is to be borne out by faithful obedience to the Ten Commandments bestowed on them through Moses, their leader, from Mount Sinai, as narrated in chapter 20 of the Book of Exodus and chapter 5 of the Book of Deuteronomy in the Jewish Bible. These commandments are manifestations of God’s love for God’s people, and by extension, for all of the people of the earth. God is a God of judgment on breaches of these commandments, but God’s judgments are expressions of love, that is, of divine yearning for the prosperity, happiness, and fulfillment of the people, for their sharing and emulating in their lives the unutterable holiness of God, for their learning to return God’s love for them in all that they do, and for their having love for one another—such compassionate and merciful love to be extended even to the foreigner or stranger within their gates. All the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden are to be included within these attitudes and actions of love. They are to be loved by each faithful Jew even as that Jew instinctively loves himself or herself (see Leviticus, chapter 19, for statements of these themes). As Marilynne Robinson notes, this last admonishment (Leviticus 19:33–34) is an early expression of what later came to be termed the Golden Rule. Insistence on its application to the foreigner or stranger, and not only to members of the Jewish covenanted community, is an anticipation of its later universal application to all peoples everywhere (Robinson 2018: 245).

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The fact that the Jewish God is a God of loving-kindness and forgiveness, and not just a God of judgment—the latter also to be viewed as an expression of God’s love, respect, and hope for humans rather than standing alone—is made abundantly clear throughout the Jewish Bible, and nowhere more so than in the Book of Hosea. Here the people of the northern portion of the now-divided Jewish kingdom are castigated throughout for their “harlotry” in betraying God and running after other gods. But this castigation is accompanied by numerous indications of God’s mercy and loving-kindness—a readiness and willingness to forgive the perfidious people and to take them back into the covenanted community. God’s unfailing mercy is exhibited in Hosea, as in all of the prophetic writings. Recognizing it, the Jews are inspired to emulate it in their relations with one another and to welcome its gracious manifestations in their own individual lives. Jewish outward lives are expected ultimately to be works of love expressed toward one another, toward the poor and oppressed in their midst, toward the foreigners or non-Jews in their lands, and in these ways also toward God. When Jesus, himself a faithful Jew, proclaims in the Gospel of Matthew that all of the Law and the Prophets come down to two Great Commandments, he shows that all of the former amount to exhortations for works of love focused on God and on all human beings. To love the first with “all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Deuteronomy 6:5) is also to love the second with equal faithfulness and strength (Matthew 22:37–40). Genuine love for God and love and justice for one another are inseparable. All humans, whatever their social status, outlooks, or behaviors are for people of Jewish faith created in the image of God. And that image deserves to be honored and loved as the very presence of God. The outer lives of adherents to the Jewish religious faith are held to extremely high standards and expectations that are meant to govern every aspect of their lives. These adherents are called upon in the book of Micah, another of the prophetic works, to “do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (6:8). Their outer lives are to be works of unstinting love for God, made unmistakably manifest by their just, merciful, and all-inclusive love for one another. Buddhist meditationalists have a set of expectations for the outward life of disciples of the Buddha, monks, nuns, and laypeople, that are remarkably similar in some important respects to what is expected of faithful followers of the Jewish faith. An influential summary statement of these expectations is “the eight streams of merit” that include the “five precepts” or “five gifts” (Bodhi 2005: 171–174).7 Going for refuge to the example of the Buddha is the first of the eight streams. Going for refuge to his teachings is the second. The third is going for refuge to the sangha, the community of Buddhist monks and nuns—either by becoming a monk or nun or by dedication to

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the support of the community and reliance on its guidance. Taken together, these three streams of merit give inner inspiration, motivation, direction, and guidance for the outward lives of Buddhists in a manner similar to the first of the Ten Commandments in the Jewish Bible, which rests the remainder of them on God’s sole authority and right to be worshiped and served as the only true God. The five additional streams of merit in Buddhism are called “The Five Precepts,” and they are basic for all Buddhist outward practice. The first one is abstaining from the destruction of life, whether of humans or of animals, thereby granting to all beings “freedom from fear, hostility, and oppression” (Bodhi 2005: 173), and by this regular abstinence freeing the Buddhist disciples themselves from such antagonistic attitudes and threats to life. One thinks here by comparison of the prohibition of murder in the Ten Commandments, but the prohibition is extended to mercifully apply to all forms of life, not just the lives of human beings. The second precept, or fifth stream of merit, prohibits one person from taking from another what is not given, and thus helping to guard all persons from the fear of what might be serious loss from theft. This prohibition is like the Ten Commandments in Jewish religion in that it warns not to steal. One also thinks here of the Commandments’ prohibition against coveting what belongs to another. The third precept counsels disciples to avoid all forms of sexual misconduct, a similar injunction to the prohibition of adultery in the Ten Commandments. The fourth precept and seventh stream of merit counsels Buddhist disciples to give up false speech and thus to guard against the evil consequences to others that can follow from such speech. This precept is similar to the prohibition against false witness in the Ten Commandments. Finally, the fifth precept advises Buddhists to avoid intoxicating liquors, with the damage their intoxications can inflict on the mind, and especially on the meditative mindfulness that is so central to Buddhist religious life. The first of the two Great Commandments in Judaism discussed earlier—the two that are said to sum up all of the Law and the Prophets—enjoins the faithful to love God with heart, soul, and mind—in other words, with full concentration and focused effort, something regular alcoholic or drug use would likely impair. These eight streams of merit trace out in brief compass some central features of strongly enjoined outward outlook and behavior in Buddhism. In these outward respects, the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and the Buddhism of the Pāli texts are not far apart. The inward disciplines of constant prayerful worship of God, on the one hand, and faithful adherence to the Buddha and his dharma, on the other, are expected in both traditions to have the effect of outward observances that are in many respects quite similar.

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I think of the analogy of two quite different initial sets of premises leading to the same or almost the same conclusions. In being inwardly true to the Buddha and his teachings, his followers are guided and strengthened to live authentic outward lives of trust and commitment; to treat one another with compassionate care; to safeguard one another from fear, hostility, and oppression; and to help one another in a spirit of justice and love. The same is true in Judaism, when it comes to worshiping and serving God with inward heart and soul and living the whole of one’s outer life with just and merciful regard for the well-being of all peoples, rich or poor, high or low status, Jews or non-Jews alike—with special attention given to the marginalized and most needy. By their fruits do the true leaders and faithful adherents of these two traditions cry out to be known—the one ardently theistic and the other intensely meditational in their different fundamental approaches to religious conviction—dissimilar approaches that are combined with strikingly similar expressions of religious conviction in their prescribed modes of life of human beings with one another in the world. This conflation of obvious and basic inner differences with remarkable outer similarities gives us much to ponder. There are commonalities of the human condition and of human need—religious as well as moral, individual as well as social—that shine through the differences between theistic and meditational interpretations of religious life. The goals and ideals for a flourishing human life set forth by theistic and meditational religion—typified in this chapter by Judaism and Buddhism in turn—are fittingly high and demanding for us humans as we struggle to live with assurance, hope, and resilience in face of the formidable perplexities, destructive forces, and debilitating evils that confront us in our individual lives, social relations, and dealings with the world in general. Religious traditions give promise of our developing appropriate responses of our inner lives such as lifelong worship and service of God, or techniques of focused and mindful meditation, that can provide the knowledge, persistence, and strength to cope with these deeply threatening issues that bring so much suffering into the world. Extremely high and demanding goals are necessary for acknowledging, comprehending, and confronting the grave existential problems confronting each individual person, and the daunting problems facing us on every hand in learning how to live with loving care and grace in our relations with one another and with all living beings. Theistic and meditational religions assure us of the power to rise to such grave threats and challenges, and to find ability to meet them head-on, whether through communion with God or through transformative meditational practices. Of course, theists must continue to meditate profoundly on their growing relations with God, as well as on the loving relations with human and nonhuman fellow creatures that ought

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naturally to flow from their love of God. And meditationalists, for their part, continue their search for mindful meditation and its increasingly selfless outlook to inspire grateful respect and saving love for all living beings. The commendable ideals of these two religious traditions have not always—needless to say—been realized in personal lives or in historical fact. Religion is an extremely powerful force in personal and social life, a power that can be and has been put to nefarious as well as salutary ends. As human history sadly demonstrates, this has all too often been the case. High and demanding ideals are one thing, living up to them is quite another. The higher the ideals, the more difficult it becomes even to approximate them in effective ways in personal and social life. But at their best, religious traditions can inspire us with the vision, hope, and motivation to continue to work toward more loving relations with one another and more just, caring, and inclusive social policies and practices. CONCLUSION My main focus in this chapter has been on the crucial role of inwardness in fully committed religious lives. In theistic religions, this inwardness takes the form of fervent devotion and faithful obedience to a personal God (or to particular gods or goddesses, in the case of polytheism). In meditational religions, it takes the form of ardent meditational practices, where the focus is on the ability of a religion’s followers to find in their inner lives the strength and resources to free themselves at last from the formidable barriers standing in the way of their achievement of salvation. Where theists find ultimate saving power in worship of and prayerful inward communion with a personal deity or deities, meditationalists find it in learning how to follow the examples of the religion’s founder (or founders) and other exemplary figures of a religious tradition by a lifelong inner discipline of detailed, strenuous, ever-developing meditational practices. Meditation is important for adherents of theistic religions as well, of course, but salvation does not come by the meditator’s own effort. It comes by the gracious presence and guidance of God or the gods, inspiring, directing, enriching, and enabling the theistic meditator’s inner life. In stressing the priority of the inner life for both theists and meditationalists, I do not want in any way to minimize the importance of the outer or behavioral lives of either of these two types of religion. I mean only to observe that the outer lives flow from and give expression to the inner ones. But neither is sufficient without the other. And experiences in outward expressions of inner faith can also have important influences on the progress

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and development of the inner faith. The two work together, each reinforcing and strengthening the other. I took particular note in this chapter of how the two religious traditions of Jewish monotheism and Buddhist meditationalism—when rightly understood, prepared for, and practiced—produce outward expressions of their differently conceived and disciplined inward lives in remarkably similar fashion. Both emphasize selfless, compassionate, just commitment of their daily lives to the well-being of others, and explicitly in the case of Buddhism, to all living beings.8 And both exhibit similar fundamental ideals and injunctions for everyday life, as shown in particular by close comparison of the Jewish Ten Commandments—along with its two summary Great Commandments— with the Buddhist “eight streams of merit.” This comparison brings into sharp focus the basic commonalities of the human condition and the fundamental needs and concerns of human existence, especially in face of the ominous seductions, threats, and dangers that bar the way to the flourishing of individual human lives, to their compassionate interactions with one another’s lives, and to their constructive relations with the world as a whole. This chapter’s discussion of the inner and outer aspects of authentic religious lives, as illustrated here by Jewish theism and Buddhist meditationalism, shows that religious salvation is not merely, or in some notable cases not at all, about a hope of being transported to some otherworldly realm of being. It is first and foremost about how to conceive, prepare, and conduct oneself—in connection with the religious tradition and community to which one may belong—in order to help bring about healing, ameliorative, and saving effects—large and small—of which this earthly world stands so obviously and desperately in need. Are both Judaism and Buddhism true? Are they equally true? Is neither true? I have not directly addressed these questions in this chapter. My intent rather was to show the great importance of the inner life for both religious traditions. I also wanted to point out how the inner and outer lives in both religions relate to one another. But there is evident truth as well as evident mystery and uncertainty in both. Both speak profoundly to the human condition, and both, at best, have created flourishing communities and exerted profound influences on human civilization and the history of humankind. But the God of Judaism, for example, is dauntingly and dreadfully holy, far exceeding any hope of full human comprehension in this life or even in a life beyond the grave, should there be such. And in Buddhism, for example, there are the mysteries of why humans have so long suffered from debilitating lives of insatiable craving, and what the final state of the arahant is when that person has finally broken free from the wheel of being and becoming. Despite their areas of inexhaustible mystery and their obvious differences from one another, Judaism and Buddhism have brought profound lessons to

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humanity about how to live within oneself, together with one another, and in the world. In many ways, the lessons in these critical areas are in important respects strikingly similar, each complementing and helping to confirm truths in particular aspects of the other. We also have much to continue to learn from their significant and indisputable differences from one another. Gaps in the one may help to fill in gaps of the other, and lessons of the one can add to lessons of the other. These observations pertain to theistic and meditational religions of other kinds as well, and not just to Judaism and Buddhism. We can never learn enough about our human condition, how to cope with suffering and evil, how to create and maintain just and loving relations with one another, and about how to respect and live in harmony with the other lifeforms of earth in their habitats and ecosystems. NOTES 1. Quotations from the New Testament are taken from the 1962 edition of the Revised Standard Version of the entire Bible listed in the Bibliography. 2. The term Tanakh is a shorthand designation for the three parts of the Hebrew Bible: Torah (first five books), Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (collected writings). The Psalms are part of the Ketuvim. 3. I am indebted for this interpretation of the meaning of God’s statement, “I AM THAT I AM,” to Roger Scruton. See his book The Face of God, chapter 3, especially pp. 51–56 of the book. This phrase is in the future tense in Hebrew, meaning “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Suggested here is the image of an active, dynamic God, the focus of which is on the emerging future of God’s ongoing interactions with the people of Israel, rather than on an aloof God outside of time. This reading is also very much in keeping with the constant interactions of this awesomely majestic yet intensely personal God with God’s human creatures that pervade the events and teachings of the Hebrew Bible. 4. I will use the more familiar Sanskrit words for key Buddhist concepts throughout this section, although I shall refer to the Pāli Canon with its differently spelled (or transliterated) terminology for discussion of aspects of Buddhist teaching, as laid out in a selected part of the Canon, as anthologized by Bodhi. 5. The five skandhas are corporeal objects, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness. See Siderits 2007: 35–37. 6. The story of the arrow is recounted in Bodhi 2005: 231–33. 7. Thich Nhat Hanh has an extensive and enlightening discussion of the five precepts in 1995: 90–110. 8. But see Deuteronomy 25:4: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.” This passage mandates compassionate concern for a domestic animal’s welfare. The ox should be allowed to eat some of the corn, the fruit of his labor, even as he treads it out or threshes it for the benefit of his owner.

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I have spent the major part of this book so far contrasting the inner world of experience, human and otherwise, with the outer world with which animals of all types—human and nonhuman—are largely occupied in order rightly to apprehend, closely engage with, and successfully adapt their ongoing lives. I have also talked of the inner life of experience and outlook, accessible only in a firsthand, unique manner by each individual experiencer, in comparison and contrast with the external, publicly available manifestations of that inner life in such things as observable modes of behavior and, in the case of humans, spoken and written language. But I have also emphasized the fact that these two realms are radically interdependent and cannot, in the last analysis, be separated from one another. I have shown that without inwardness, there would be no such thing as life in any form, and that without outwardness or an external world on which life-forms are critically dependent, there would also be no lives of any kind. Let me put this first point as starkly and unmistakably as I can. If the inner world of subjective experience were to vanish, whether we have in mind humans or nonhuman animals, ranging from amoebas and bacteria to elephants and whales, there would be no such thing as an external world for these creatures. Why not? Because the world as object is crucially dependent on some kind of subject from the perspective of which it can be recognized and responded to as object. I am not claiming that the world would cease to exist with the absence of subjects, only that there would be no recognized world to respond to, adapt to, ruminate on, or talk about. All meaningful worlds are interpreted worlds, and these meaningful worlds are differently interpreted, not only from internal human perspectives, but from internal perspectives of any kind, human and nonhuman alike. The different interpretations range from life-form to life-form, each nested within its own ecological environment, with its particular kind of ecological dependence—and for humans, from historical context to context, human language to human language, past cultural epochs to present and future ones. 129

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These comments apply as much to the natural sciences as to any other aspect of human culture, whether it be religion, philosophy, art, technology, and the like. There is no way to escape the conclusion that the world is always what it is seen-as, never what it might be thought to be in-itself. Even a supposed God’s-eye view of the world is just that, one internal apprehension among others, no matter how wise and comprehensive it might be deemed to be. This might initially sound like a strange and unlikely thing to say, so let me explain it in the following way. A SUPPOSED GOD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE WORLD If there were even only one non-divine vision of the world in addition to God’s, this fact would indicate that the God’s-eye vision could not exhaust ways in which the world is conceived. The former, if all-comprehending, would somehow have to encompass and completely include the one non-divine vision. It would, by definition, have to comprehend and contain even this non-divine one. It perhaps could strive to do so, but only on pain of finally having to acknowledge its failure to achieve total comprehension. For if successful, it would have had somehow to include its own contradiction, its inclusion—without exclusion—of a genuinely internal perspective on the world irreducibly different from its own. Inclusively and exhaustively to know all things is thus paradoxically not to know some things—to acknowledge that, in the very nature of things, not all things can be exhaustively known. As long as there is a world different from God, its difference cannot be reduced to God’s perspective. And without such a world, God becomes a solipsist, with no object of knowledge or awareness other than Godself. If the perspective of any knower is said somehow to incorporate and transcend its own otherwise limited perspectives, then the objects of the act of such knowledge can no longer qualify as independent objects of knowledge. But if there are no independent objects, how can there be knowledge? The supposed God’s-eye, wholly in-itself world vanishes with the necessary distinction between the knower and what it purports to know. If God is truly to know all things without remainder, then only God can exist. Other alleged perceivers and knowers must be regarded as phantoms or projections of God’s imagination. The upshoot of these reflections is that there is no such thing as an in-itself, uninterpreted, all-comprehending world, even for God. But what if God were to become a human being and experience the world, at least for a time, as a human? Would God not then be able to perceive the world from a limited human perspective as well as from God’s own unlimited perspective? In that case, God could view the world as it truly is, including at least one finite perspective, as well as from God’s own infinite one.

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God would experience and know the world from the inside as it is for finite beings, and not just from the outside as an infinite one. God could then be all-knowing, including in the compass of God’s vast knowledge even what it is like to be finite and to experience the world from a limited, finite perspective. (I shall set aside for the purposes of the following brief discussion the complaint that, for God truly to know the entire world as it allegedly is in-itself, God would have to become or always to be somehow incarnate in every finite perspective, not just that of a human being). This is the incarnational claim of traditional Christian theology, with its view of the historical Jesus as “truly God and truly man” (Council of Chalcedon, 451 CE; see Bettenson 1953: 73). The in-itself world is the world not only seen but also experienced as such by God by virtue of God the Father’s incarnation in Jesus, the Son, who lived for a time on the face of the earth as a man. The trouble with this idea from a philosophical standpoint, however, is that it is incoherent. Were God to become a human, God would have to be limited in God’s outlook—limited by the finitude of a genuinely human perspective on the world—meaning that God would cease to be God as God is traditionally defined. In other words, God could experience the world as humans do, from the inside, only by no longer being God—at least for some limited period of time. The supposed God-man could not be both at one and the same time. To claim it as both would be a contradiction. The only alternative to this view would seem to be what in the history of Christian theology was called Docetism, the idea that God only seemed (Greek: dokeo) to be a human being. But seeming to live as a human is not the same as actually doing so. Docetism was accordingly branded as a heresy in the early history of the Christian Church (Bettenson 1953: 50, 105). The price paid for God’s claimed ability to know the world as it is in-itself, comprehending at least one of its finite perspectives from the inside, even while maintaining God’s own infinite, all-comprehending knowledge of everything in the world, is the price of intractable contradiction. Theologians more able than I can perhaps untangle the contradiction. But I can see no way of doing so. The best way to be rid of it, it seems to me, is to give up the idea of the God’s-eye view of the world as a way of trying to comprehend the world “in-itself,” beyond all the limitations of finitude, perspective, or interpretation. The world in all its guises is and must be a multi-faceted interpreted world, a world also viewed from the inside and never, in the very nature of the case, in a purely external fashion. Were there no subjects, there would be no objects. In order for there to be objects, there must be subjects different from the objects. To know from within as a subject is to know firsthand, from one’s own unique, irreplaceable standpoint, a standpoint that can never be captured

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externally and in its entirety within some kind of all-comprehending whole. What goes for one such internal perspective goes for them all, and the earth is suffused with them because all living beings have internality of some sort, as I have argued repeatedly in this book. THE DREAM OF A SCIENTIFIC “THEORY OF EVERYTHING” A similar point applies to any perspective, scientific or otherwise, that claims to be or eventually to become all-inclusive and thus to include even all scientists themselves without remainder—and therefore to cancel out the necessary limitations of science’s own human perspective, to say nothing of the limitations posed by the unique inner perspective of each scientist. Scientists themselves, now viewed as nothing more than commensurable objects deprived of the distinctive standpoints of their subjectivity, have failed thereby to recognize the central, ineliminable role of different scientific subjects in mounting and defending this conclusion. A supposed scientific theory of everything would have to eliminate the diversity of subjects and somehow convert this diversity into the unity of one object for its claim to all-comprehending knowledge. Total scientific objectivity, to put the point differently, cannot include the diverse inwardness of individual subjects. To view it as the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry is to eliminate from consideration what ought to be included and, in fact, must be included in an adequate scientific perspective. It is to foreclose any further advance and to reduce the creative dynamism of different perspectives to the static sameness of one perspective. It is to bring science itself to an end. A science where everything is claimed ultimately to be nothing more than objects, where subjectivity is really objectivity in disguise, would be no science at all, partly because it would have no claimants and partly because objects of knowledge are correlated with subjects as knowers. We are long used to the scientific insistence in the West that there is no inwardness that is not dependent on the outwardness of the physical world and the physical body, but we are not sufficiently cognizant of the fact that there would be no such thing as science were it not for the distinctive inwardness of human subjects and human minds. In point of fact, there would also be no such thing as world, considered as the object of thought and awareness. Which is primary, then, objectivity or subjectivity, body or mind? The correct answer, in my view, is that neither is prior to the other, because the concept of the one presupposes the concept of the other. A simple example can help to make this point clear. The cup of coffee I am now drinking is, I say to myself, neither bland nor bitter, but just the right

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balance of flavor. How do I arrive at this view? I do so by tasting the coffee and interpreting its quality in this manner. Considered as something objective, coffee has no flavor. It acquires flavor when put to the test by the subjectivity or inwardness of taste. The flavor of the coffee does not exist in the coffee beans alone, nor in the taste alone. It exists in the relation of the two, in the relation of the outer with the inner. The inner act of tasting the coffee and determining its flavor in this manner is an essential fact of the world. To try to reduce the coffee’s flavor to something entirely external or objective is to destroy the relationship on which it depends for its meaning. What is true of the coffee is also true of the world as a whole. Without acts of interpretation and the firsthand experiences on which such acts crucially depend, there would be no such thing as a world. Finally, and this is the crucial point, given that acts of interpretation are unavoidable for there to be such a thing as a world, and given that acts of interpretation frequently differ from one another, there is no such thing as a single, in-itself world. There are only the many worlds of multiple interpretations, some more comprehensive and convincing than others, but none entitled to be regarded as the finally true picture of the world that requires all others to be set aside. There is no escaping, other words, the dependence of the outer on the inner and the equal dependence of the inner on the outer. INTERPRETING SUBJECTS AND INTERPRETED OBJECTS There is no meaningful world without interpretation. All worlds, comprehensible as such, are interpreted worlds. Similarly, there is no meaning to internality without a requisite contrast with something external, something not confined to internality. Life is not just a dream, and the world so-called is in truth the multiple worlds of different contexts, conditions, and interpretations at any given time and over all times. Even the commonalities among such visions of the world are commonalities or intersections of different interpretations. The inner and the outer can be distinguished from one another, but their necessary interfusions with one another must also be taken fully into account. There is no such thing as an infinite, unrestricted, all-encompassing vision of the world, but there is plenty of room for the ongoing search for more inclusive, consensual, and adequate human conceptions of the world. Such conceptions should not be confined, however, to the natural or social sciences but should include all the important, eminently useful contributions of human conceptuality, expression, and experience. Hence, each of the diverse

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aspects of human culture need to be incorporated—from poetry to physics, from resilient ordinary language to exact syntactical systems, from evocative religious symbolism to rigorously reasoned philosophy, from older thinkers, with a conserving eye, andthe indispensable, guiding, steadying resources of the past, to younger ones with an enthusiastic, innovating eye that is focused on fresh possibilities of the future. In noting that all worlds are interpreted worlds, I do not mean to suggest that worlds are constructed out of thin air with no responsibility to anything other than the fertile imaginations of their constructors. There are undeniable and unavoidable obduracies and resistances of the world to our theoretical hypotheses, as well as ready allowances for at least some of them, and both factors must at all times be observed and respected. The outer world is no willy-nilly construction of the inner mind. No matter how compellingly elegant an imagined hypothesis or set of hypotheses may be, it or they must be responsible to the relevant kinds of experience and stand up under the demands of that experience. Furthermore, such hypotheses must always remain open to the possibility of their future falsification and substitution by new ways of thinking that are better equipped to align with the requirements of ongoing experience. These statements apply to all responsible modes of thought, and not just to scientific ones. This realization is a constant reminder that more than sheer construction or invention is required, no matter how impressive the quality and range of a particular conceptual scheme may appear. The tests of each scheme must be public and shareable, not just private or firsthand in their nature. They must include more than elegance of self-contained form, meeting the test of relevant experience as well. The outward must be brought into cooperation with the inward in order to provide a plausible vision of the world. Each is necessary and neither is sufficient by itself. To aspire toward a completely objective or entirely outward or external view of the world is to do the world every bit as much violence as to think that it can be reduced to something wholly subjective, mental, or inward. We must always be on guard against letting the weight of past ways of thinking blind us to possibly better new ways of thinking, but we must also avoid being so enamored of seductive new ways of thinking that they blind us to what is experientially tested and reliably true in the old ones. We are not in thrall to the past, but the past has helped to bring us to where we are in the present, and it can help to guide us in searching for and arriving at needed innovations for the future. We never start out with a blank slate, and for that we can be grateful. Our inherited culture provides us with much to work with, and we would be helpless without it. But our inner lives are sources not only of memory and conservation but also of envisioned possibility and warranted innovation. Both can continue to contribute to our visions

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of ourselves and our world. And both, working together, can help to safeguard us against the illusion that we are masters of the world, entitled to dominate and control all else within it. It is this illusion that has brought us and the earth to the present state of ominous ecological crisis and devastation. The inner can be an enemy of the outer, even as the outer—in the guise of trying to make everything external, objective, and manipulable—can obviate the need to take full account of the necessary role of the inner. The two must be acknowledged as necessary complements to and never as opponents of one another. Each limits and relativizes the other, as German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us in this passage from his book Truth and Method: The criterion for the continuing expansion of our own world picture is not given by a “world in itself” that lies beyond all language. Rather, the infinite perfectibility of the human experience of the world means that, whatever language we use, we never succeed in seeing anything but an ever more extended aspect, a “view” of the world. Those views of the world are not relative in the sense that one could oppose them to the “world in itself,” as if the right view from some possible position outside the human, linguistic world could discover it in its being-in-itself. (1993: 447)1

And neither nor both together can be set in meaningful contrast with an imagined single, in-itself, non-perspectival, non-interpreted world. Moreover, such a world, even if it were to be wrongly conceived as possible, would lack the incontestable value of the many interpreted worlds whose existences I have defended up to this point. THE VALUE OF MULTIPLE INTERPRETED WORLDS Perhaps under the influence of Western monotheism, especially in its mystical forms—which would also include some Eastern systems of religious and philosophical thought—we have fallen into the idea that unity trumps plurality, that reduction of all possible diversity into one all-encompassing and finally absolutely true vision of reality as ultimately one is a goal to which we should constantly strive. The ancient philosopher Plotinus gave expression to this idea in his work The Enneads when he argued that from the One (to hen) everything in the universe emanates, and we see something similar in the Daoist idea that all existence derives from the unnameable Dao, or in the present scientific idea that it has all stemmed in its entirety from the preexisting Big Bang singularity, where all scientific theories finally break down.

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But why do we tend to assume that one ultimate reality is superior to many ultimate realities? Why do we let this assumption blind us to the possible need for and perceptible value of an irreducible manyness? Why do we think without question that there must be a single, solitary, in-itself world? I want for us to pause to think about what would be lost in such a world, were it to be assumed to exist, and perhaps to learn to cherish the idea of irreducibly many, ongoingly interpreted worlds—posited as such not only epistemically but metaphysically as well. A way to think about this idea of the irreducible importance and value of manyness, as over against an all-including oneness, is to reflect on three observations. The first of these three is that a plurality of subjects and objects would have to be absorbed into the solitary unity of one and only one subject with no object distinct from itself, the point made above when I argued that for God to completely know all things would logically require that God be the one and only existent being. I will let my argument there suffice to show the illogic and implausibility of this first observation, which wipes out every existing thing other than God. Proponents of certain types of mystical experience might love this conclusion, but it renders shockingly deceptive and irrelevant all other kinds of experience, including the experience of each person’s own existence—including the existence of the mystic. The second observation is that the many-splendored, ever-changing world, the existence of which we commonly experience and assume today, would have to give way to a static one in which nothing new happens and nothing different exists or ever could exist. The third observation is that neither you nor I, nor any other kind of finite subject or interpreter could really exist as distinct from the unitary world, no matter how vividly real we might presently seem to ourselves. These are high prices to pay for an imagined, truly in-itself, wholly uninterpreted world. I want now to examine the second and third observation in more detail. With regard to the second one, we should note that a static, unchanging, monolithic world is nothing like the world we presently experience and conceive, partly on account of the work of the natural sciences, but also as a consequence of our everyday lives. Not only do we encounter immense diversity in our experienced world, but we also have to take into account enormous amounts of ongoing change—in our own bodies and developing minds, in our human histories and cultures, and in the animate and inanimate things that surround us on every hand. Everywhere there is diversity, and everywhere there is change. Stars come into being and explode out of being, their satellites along with them. Our sun and its planets, including earth, are not said by reputable scientists to be immune to this process.

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Moreover, even the most fundamental theories of the universe that have preoccupied us and convinced us in the past have given way to later ones, and features of the present ones continue to be subjected to deep question and debate among responsible scientists. We are a long way from anything like a finally satisfying theory of everything, even in the limited field of physics. Aristotle’s static universe, with no such thing as cosmic, terrestrial, or biological evolution, has yielded to our radically dynamic one that incorporates all three. The first-century Roman philosopher Lucretius’s vision of uncuttable (or indivisible), constantly swerving atoms has been supplanted by the complexities of today’s subatomic physics, with atoms’ divisions into more fundamental particles, waves, gluons, axions, quarks, and the like. Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe has been replaced by the sun-centered one of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. The solar system has come to be located over time by scientists as a tiny part of the immense Milky Way, and that has been replaced by the view of the Milky Way as only one among billions of galaxies, each with its components of billions of stars and their accompanying planets. Galaxies and stars are presently seen by scientists as evolving and devolving, being created and destroyed. And the universe is said to be spreading out at an ever accelerating rate, the further out into space its outermost parts have expanded. The idea of a single, in-itself world has been challenged by the idea of multi-universes, either evolving sequentially over time or even present throughout nature at all times. The widely assumed parameters of the present scientific view of the world today may well have to yield to those of different ones—even radically different ones—of tomorrow. There is no foreseeable end to the fallibility and defeasibility of interpreted worldviews, or to their uncountable numbers. And if we stop to think carefully about the matter, there is no compelling reason to believe that this state of affairs is now somehow the case or that it could at a later time become true. It is desirable to aspire toward more inclusive worldviews, of course, but I am arguing that it is not only undesirable but in fact impossible for there to be an in-itself world that somehow contains, supplants, and renders superfluous all possible interpretations of itself—an imagined world that is just what it is in and of itself, independent of all interpretations of what it is. It is good to realize that such a world is impossible, for it is the futile dream of a world well-lost. Thus it is folly to try to adjust our theories and understandings to such a bogus world. Interpretations can be better or worse, but so long as there is real inwardness and real outwardness in our picture of the world, there is the reality of irreducibly real multiple interpretations of the nature—or better, “natures”—of the world. This is so because the world includes the multifariousness of its inward perspectives, and an adequate understanding

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of it must take these inward perspectives fully into account. There is no way of adding them up into a single, all-inclusive perspective or, more properly, non-perspective, because they are finally and not just temporarily incommensurable to a significant degree, as well as being irreducibly real among living beings of any kind. This observation applies not only to different species of life but also to individuals within those species. There are partial overlaps—some greater and others less so—among aspects of these diverse perspectives, but there is no way in which they can all be reduced to or even rightly conceived as one all-encompassing perspective or to a purely nonperspectival, in-itself, exclusively outer world. CELEBRATING DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORLD The unavailability and even the incomprehensibility of an in-itself world should not be seen as a tragedy. It should rather be recognized as something to be welcomed and celebrated. The reason for this conclusion is that it allows for a world that is wondrous because of its irreducible multifariousness, the inexhaustible glory of all of its diverse creatures, each with its own distinctive perspective on the world. Whatever unity there is in the world, and it is admittedly fascinating and considerable—is accompanied by its incredible diversity, its irreducibility to some single fact or point of view. Unity-diversity or universe-multiverse is far preferable to either a bland, seamless uniformity or a hodgepodge of isolated, disconnected, independent beings. The collapse of manifold individual perspectives on a pervasively perspectival world would mean that there could be no authentic, irreducible individual species of life, from flora to fauna, life-form to life-form. There would be no such thing as waterlilies, lilacs, oak trees, sequoias, beetles, bees, dolphins, salmon, chimpanzees, horses, hippopotamuses, or humans. The splendid diversity of nature would give way to debilitating, boring, uninspiring sameness. The ongoing adventure of nature naturing would have to yield to a fixed, idle nature already completely natured. The gnawing teeth of time could produce no new insights or contribute in any way to the alterations or improvements of older ones. Once having come to a complete understanding of a putative in-itself world, there would be nothing more to be learned or aspired toward. Even slight changes in the world could introduce unexpected puzzles and uncertainties. To arrive at comprehensive knowledge of a supposed in-itself world, were that even possible given the world whose unceasing obduracies and inviting new perspectives we experience day after day, would be to arrive at a state of existence both unimaginable and unappealing for finite beings such as

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ourselves. It would be a world devoid of the evocative grandeur and beauty of contrast and difference—even of those the course of time and its changing perspectives on past and future would produce in ongoing fashion. The basic point is this: inexhaustible diversity of perspectives is an undeniable good. Finality and complete, unchanging unity are indistinguishable from universal death. To arrive at what might seem to be an in-itself, non-perspectival, non-changing world would mean the extinction of all life, including one’s own. Happily, there is no such thing as a completely in-itself world, even for God, as I showed earlier, at least as long as there is a real world for God to relate to. It is entirely fitting and desirable that this be so. Without the inner, there is no outer to stand in necessary conceptual contrast with it. And without the outer, there is nothing for a supposed inner to be produced by, be sustained by, interact with, or be critically dependent on. The endless tensions and interactions of the inner and outer are what make possible a world such as ours. They are also what make the idea of an in-itself world and the dream of somehow arriving at full comprehension of such a world an idle fancy. There is no escape from a multiplicity of fallible, limited perspectives in a world of diverse living creatures. This point applies as much to us human would-be knowers of the world, in the final analysis, as it does to the rest of the members of the millions of organic species of the earth, past, present, or future. The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that sensate experiences are blind without conceptual interpretations of those experiences, and that concepts by themselves would be empty without reference to such experiences (1958: 93). Psychologist and philosopher William James argued similarly in the early twentieth century when he insisted that what he called “pure,” uninterpreted experience would be nothing more than chaotic confusion without conceptual interpretations of its possible meanings (1976: 46). Since he denied rationality to animals, Kant did not attribute concepts or consciousness to them. But contemporary animal ethicist Bernard E. Rollin argues convincingly that we have every reason to allow to animals concepts of some kinds on the basis of which they can and do interpret, remember, organize, and anticipate their experiences of the world (1989: 143). Hence not only are interpretations of experience necessary for our experiences to have use and meaning, but such interpretations also reach all the way across and down into the animal worlds. As we saw in earlier chapters, not only can consciousness and rationality of some kind be attributed to many different kinds of animals, but sense-making must be recognized as a fundamental defining property of them all. Their worlds without exception, as well as ours, must be acknowledged to be interpreted worlds. The world is in fact a mixture of many worlds, worlds with significant interpretive overlaps and commonalities but also with uncountable interpretive differences.

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Am I claiming that there are no such things as facts for us humans or that all so-called truths and values are hopelessly relative? No, I am simply saying that what are claimed to constitute such, whether rightly or wrongly, are at bottom also interpretive claims, claims made from the interpretive stances of fallible creatures like ourselves. A fact is something set apart, focused on, and interpreted as such. The Latin world factum is the participle form of the verb facere, “to make,” an etymological point that ties in with the idea that selected facts are originally recognized and identified as such by acts of interpretation, whether with focused awareness at a given moment or not. The more expansive and general such claims become, the more open to possible challenge they become from other interpretive claims of the past, present, or future— and especially of the presently unknowable future which becomes all the more unpredictable and unknowable the farther it proceeds from the present. I am especially arguing that any claim to absolute, unassailable, undeniable truth or value regarding the world as a whole—that is, a supposed in-itself, uninterpreted, indisputable world picture—is doomed to failure. Claims to truth and value regarding the nature of the entire world, past, present, and future, no matter how brilliantly argued, are all open to question by different persons, different groups, different times, and different conceptual schemes, simply because no such claims can plausibly or believably be said to be beyond any kind of future revision or dispute. This is not conceptual relativism. It is humble and, I think, rightful acknowledgment of conceptual fallibilism. The multiplicity of inner outlooks and relationships in the world make implausible the expectation that any single perspective can do full justice to the unfathomable complexity of the world. There are better and worse, more inclusive and less inclusive, perspectives. But it is unlikely in the extreme that there could ever be a finally all-inclusive one, beyond all need for further question, modification, or interpretation. Even if conclusive knowledge of such an in-itself world were deemed to be possible in terms of large-scale abstractions, a relentless barrier to full understanding of such a world is the spatial and temporal inexhaustibility of multitudinous, concrete, ever-changing inner perspectives, human and nonhuman, that such alleged knowledge would have to incorporate. CONCLUSION I have argued throughout this chapter that there is no single way the world is. The world (or more properly, “worlds”) includes an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives or inward experiences of, interactions with, and facings toward what is outward to, or the objects of, those perspectives from their

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distinctive, unique, irreducible standpoints. In the absence of the myriads of such perspectives, there would be nothing outward because the inward and the outward are conceptually inseparable and factually interdependent. Thus there can be no such thing as an in-itself, purely objective, ultimately single world even for a supposed all-knowing God because such a God would have to enter into and swallow up into God’s-self all of the other perspectives on the world, thus rendering them illusory and not even partially deserving of the name knowledge. If God knows everything in inexhaustible detail—and in both its inner and outer aspects—then these other assumed perspectives can really know nothing that is truly their own or defines them as real individuals. Either that, or God is somehow able to take into account and actually enter into their genuine finite perspectives, meaning that God would both know everything without residue and yet fail to do so—experience the world from within, both as universal all-knower and as an exhaustive knower of each detail of the limited particular perspectives on the world—and thus be infallible and fallible at the same time. If the world is real and contains a multiplicity of actual as well as possible internal perspectives on its reality and as part of its reality, then it cannot be concretely knowable as a single entity or object. This means, among other things, that the world of manifold perspectives cannot be meaningfully contrasted with a single non-perspectival world, and should not be sought for as such. The upshot of these considerations is that a non-perspectival or uninterpreted world is an impossibility and thus that all worlds are interpreted worlds—some more accurate and inclusive than others, but none finally accurate or completely inclusive. To cite the most obvious example of this reasoning, if I could completely capture the firsthandness of your experience into mine, then I would show it to be objective after all and not truly firsthand. But then some other perspectival experience could do the same with my experience, and so on, until all seemingly firsthand experience is collapsed into a purely objective world. Subjects in such a case become illusory, and this would have to include, by the reasoning of this chapter, even the subjectivity of God, given that there is no internality of God to be contrasted with the externality of the world. There is nothing to be known by God but the subjectivity of Godself. The world is nothing other than a figment of God’s imagination. If God knows everything, both inner and outer, then there is nothing but God to be known. This is the picture of the one true world entertained by philosophical Idealists for whom the experienced world is nothing other than ideas in the mind of God. But are the world’s subjective experiencers of these ideas also to be included in this description? If so, Divine solipsism hardly seems to be a desirable substitute for a real, multi-faceted, inexhaustibly diverse perspectival world. If not, then the inevitability of varying interpretations by the finite experiencers remains,

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including rejection of the wholesale interpretation of the world as consisting finally and truly only of God’s ideas. Even more fundamentally, if the world (or worlds) is truly a metaphysical pluralism, then God can only know it as such. To think of it as reducible without remainder to the subjective unity of God’s perspective or alleged all-comprehending, absolutely veridical point of view would destroy its metaphysical character, even if that character were intended to be such by a creator God. For God to know both the inner and outer character of everything means that only God can exist. All seeming individuality, uniqueness, and distinctiveness other than that of God become illusory. This implication amounts, to my mind, to a reductio ad absurdum of the stipulation of such an ultimately monistic, in-itself, uninterpreted world. Not even real time could exist for an all-knowing God, for real time involves a future whose novelties, as necessary complements to its continuities, prohibit complete knowledge in the present of all of its future outcomes—especially to the extent that these outcomes stretch further and further into the future. I argued not only for the unintelligibility of a single, in-itself, uninterpreted world but also for the immense value of a diverse world of irreducible firsthand perspectives, as over against the dubious ideal of a world somehow reducible to some single perspective. The latter kind of world would not only be unintelligibly abstract, but it would also lack the multifarious, evocative, wondrous complexity and diversity of many different perspectives, a large number of them entertained and defended by humans throughout their history and up to the present day, and uncountably more of them the diverse perspectives of other kinds of organic life, including those now extinct and those someday destined to become extinct. What is the world really like? Author Verlyn Klinkenborg’s observation, made in connection with his review of a series of books about ten different animals (including the human animal), is a cogent acknowledgment of the principal theme of the present book: “Nearly every creature on this planet has a sensorium of one kind or another—ears, nose, antennae, statocyst, etc.—a means of detecting and orienting itself in its world. It’s impossible to imagine those sensoria and the kind of awareness they create in creatures as alien to us as the squid” (one of the ten animals in the series) (2020: 70). Note that Klinkenborg rightly refers to its world—the distinctive world of each creature—not to a single world supposedly or indisputably common to all such creatures. To say with him that it is impossible to imagine aspects of the worlds of nonhuman creatures is, I believe, an overstatement, because there are intersections between their worlds and ours, just as there are necessary intersections of the world of each creature with those of others with which it comes into contact or on which it depends for its livelihood and survival. But it is

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also the case with human animals that any one of us can conceive only a part of the particular world of any other human being, past, present, or future. And even then, we can at best only imagine aspects of those other worlds because we cannot directly experience or interpret them firsthand. All any of us creatures have available to us at any time, whether a human being or some other kind of animal—or a human in relation to another kind of animal—is an interpreted world. These interpreted worlds admittedly overlap and thus make our lives in relation to one another possible, but they never coalesce into a single, in-itself, uninterpreted world. There is always tension, to some considerable degree, between the vision of an outer world based on a particular animal’s experiences and the plethora of differently interpreted worlds that grow out of the experiences of others. The dream of a single, all-encompassing, finally true perspective founders, as I argued above, not only on the incalculable number of internal perspectives on the externality of the world, but also on the relentless creative and transformative effects of time. The endless perspectivity or ceaseless interpretability of the world is something to be celebrated, something to grateful for, not something to be deplored. In comparison with it, the dream of finally arriving at comprehensive knowledge of a supposed in-itself world pales into insignificance, if not outright horror. For even we humans—to say nothing of all the other creatures of the earth—if deprived of ultimately firsthand, diverse, and uniquely useful inner perspectives on the world, could no longer flourish or even rightly be said to be alive. The one-eyed, one-dimensional cyclops of such an in-itself world would consume everything but itself. And it would soon lie dying because of the indigestibility of what it has sought to consume. NOTE 1. I strongly recommend Gadamer’s Truth and Method to readers of this chapter. He defends its central thesis with impressive depth and detail of relevant references and arguments, especially in Part Two of the book.

Bibliography

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Index

Abraham, 111–12 Ackerman, Jennifer, 60, 62, 63 Aristotle, 9, 33–35, 41, 47, 137 Art, as exhibiting interaction of inner and outer, subject and object, 13–14 Bhikkhu Bodhi, see Religion Big Bang singularity, 135 Blom, Phillip, 32, 36 Brannen, Peter, 32 Brain, interpreted as a computer, 91 Buchler, Justus, 8 Buddha, the, see Religion Causality, efficient, and freedom, 43–46 Certainty, epistemic ideal of, 91–92 Consciousness, adaptive value of, 52; all living beings, conscious or not, have inward needs, responses, and agential powers, 28; close connection with freedom of thought and action, 52; no creatures are unfeeling mechanisms without any semblance of an inner life, 29; not limited to humans, 9–10, 19, 25, 36; 49–50, 52, 64, 67; its relation to tool-making, something irreducibly new under the sun, 98; 55, 60–62; viewed as epiphenomenal, 91–92,

94; see also Consciousness, human; New Caledonian Crows; Octopuses; Sperm Whales; Self, human Consciousness, human, 50–53; acts of in relation to external environments, 51; allows for intentional effects on the world, 105; complex neurological system underlying, 51; continuously unfolding flow of awareness, 50; and the creative resources of language, 106; dreams, 51; and experience of pain, 51; and gift of freedom, 105–6; greatly aided by language, 38–39, 51–52; makes possible mindful appreciation for the world’s grandeur and beauty, 103–4; marks each human being as a unique self with self-awareness, self-agency, and self-worth, 104–5; and metaconsciousness, 51; miracle of, 102–7; not possible without the sustaining power of the external world, 106; rational inquiry, discovery, and creativity notable capabilities of, 50, 105; and “skillful coping” (Thompson), 51; as source of indispensable value and importance of human cultures, 105, 106; to think of it as mechanical or machine-like 149

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is a contradiction, 103, 106; uniquely accessible forms of for each human self, 51; see also Consciousness Crosby, Pamela, vii, 4, 49, 90 Cultural evolution, 36; 37, 67–68; commonalities of experience persisting through it, 37; influences on it of interactions with other cultural traditions, 37–38; its influence on views of the world, 38; its relation to teaching and learning, 64; its relation to various social roles and their different worldviews, 36; its role in some nonhuman life forms, 59–60; 60–61, 62; supplements biological evolution, 64 Damasio, Antonio, 44 Daoism, 135 Darwin, Charles, 19, 29 Descartes, René, 41, 47 Dewey, John, 5, 91 Drozdek, Adam, 93–94; reference to Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, 94; views idea of single, all-inclusive world as incomprehensible, 94 Ecological crisis, limitations of prudential responses to it, 22–23; exploitative treatments of such creatures a kind of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, 28–29; phenomenological, empathetic engagement and concern essential to dealing with it as well, 23–24; response to the objections that attention to, and respect for, the inner lives of threatened nonhuman life forms is sentimental and anthropomorphic, 24–25 Education, as operant conditioning, 45 Epistemological pluralism, not same as epistemological relativism, 12.

Exploitation; examples of in human life include slavery, brothels, concentration camps, treatment of workers, and self-imposed or self-allowed exploitation, 100–2; regarding and treating living beings as external objects or causeeffect machines, 102; as result of objectification or failure to recognize or respect the inner lives of organisms, 100–2; Facts, as interpretations, 140 Fallibilism, conceptual, not the same thing as conceptual relativism, 140 Freedom, agential, see Causality, efficient; Education; Machine model of reality; Questioning; Rationality; Science; Self Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 135, 143n1 Galileo, Galilei, 39, 137 Gazzaniga, Michael S., 44 Gero, Shane, 56, 57, 59 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 98 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 39 Gogh, Vincent Van, 39 Golden Rule, 21, 28, 41, 65, 121 Goodman, Nelson, 3, 15–16 Heron, blue, see World(s) Hodges-Kluck, Jana, vii Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 68, 86n1; his conception of the “inscape,” 77; Kane’s appropriation of this conception, 71 Husserl, Edmund, 22 Inner and outer, as different perspectives rather than different realities, 14; each dependent on the other, 18, 20–22, 39–40, 87–89, 96; high moral import of considering and empathizing with the inner lives of

Index

human and other kinds of organism, 24, 63, 100–2; inwardness of freedom, 108; inner aspects of organisms as functions of matter but irreversibly new and not reducible to earlier kinds of matter, 98; inner dimensions of all forms of earthly life, 108; not obliterated by external and deterministic approaches, 46, 98; as useful metaphors, 14; see also Exploitation; Religion; Subjectivity; World(s) Intentions, dependent on but not reducible to cause-effect relations, 98, 97–98 James, William, 8, 17, 139 Jesus, see Religion Jonas, Hans, 22 Kane, Robert, 68–75, 83 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 42, 47, 139; see also Rationality Kepler, Johannes, 39, 137 Kirsch, Adam, 6, 12 Klinkenberg, Verlyn, 142 Kuttner, Robert, 37 Leopold, Aldo, 20–21 Life, defined, 19; evolutionary continuity of, 19; a lively field of experience, 21; phenomenological approach to necessary for fuller understanding of, 19, 21, 22 Lucretius, 137 Machine model of reality, ideal of analysis and understanding, 91; allure of, 90–96, 97; analogy with a logical system, 91; applied to life, mind, and consciousness, 92, 94; autonomy not same as automaticity, 10; and claimed omnicompetence of natural science, emergentism as alternative to, 96–100; and flow of

151

time, 97; human body not a machine, 13; as invitation to exploitation, 10, 63; 10; as self-contradictory, 10 Matter, not to be denigrated, 48; see also Mind; Wilczek, Frank Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 22 Michelangelo, 13 Mind, eliminative materialism as implausible as idealism, 15; a function of material bodies, 9, 13; immense scope of the mental, 26; involves autopoeisis, sentience, and purposiveness, 18–19; and metathought, 13; mind and world not separate orders of being, 13; no worlds without minds, 14–15; not the same thing as the aspects of matter described in physics, 95; not separate from or reducible to matter, 96; present in all kinds of life, unconscious as well as conscious, 17–19; something new under the sun, 95; subject and object as correlative, 13, 15 Morality, and causal determinism, 45; exemplification of the character and demand of the moral life and of Kane’s “moral sphere” in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Jack, 75–81; 84–86; has respect for both inner experience and outer accomplishment, 10, 68–69, 83; human ethics a subset of environmental ethics, 65; and Kane’s “moral sphere,” 69–70, 72–73, 74, 75, 83, 84, 86; and two kinds of objective moral worth, 68–75, 83; importance of openness to individuals’ and species’ commonalities as well as differences, 82–83; uniqueness of each living being’s inner life, 71–72, 74–75, 79, 80–81, 83; uniqueness of each species; see also Nonhuman forms of life; Rationality; Self

152

Nature, all life forms within dependent on the food chain, 90; ambiguity of, 90; both pro-life and therefore necessarily pro-death, 90; even exclusive dependence on plants or plant-based foods a form of predation, 90; predation a requirement for life within, 90 New Caledonian Crows, consciousness of, 60–64 Newton, Isaac, 39, 137 Nonhuman forms of life, as mere machines, 41, 88–89; as deeply deserving of moral regard, 73–75; moral fallacy of their not being seen as deserving of moral resect and regard, 42, 75, 81 Octopuses, consciousness of, 53–56 Picasso, Pablo, 39 Plato, 9, 33, 47; see also Rationality Plotinus, 135 Psyche, 9, Aristotle’s conception of, 33–35, close in important ways to Evan Thompson’s concept of mind in life and to my own conception of self, 35; Plato’s conception of, 33 Ptolemy, 137 Questioning, as an act of freedom, 46 Rationality, inseparable from agential freedom, 42–46, 47; Descartes’ and Kant’s restriction of it and morality to humans, 41–42; not the unique capability of humans, 42 Religion, Abraham’s faith as completed by his works, 112–13; Abraham’s dreadful, submissive encounter with God on the occasion of God’s establishment of the covenant with God’s people, 116–17; animals, fair treatment of in the Jewish Bible, 127n8; arduousness of the Buddhist

Index

meditational path, 118; Bhikkhu Bodhi, 117, 118; both Buddhism and Jewish monotheism have much to teach us about the religious life 126–27; Buddha not to be worshiped but imitated, 117–18; Buddhist meditational and Jewish theistic conceptions of the ideal religious life remarkably similar in many respects, 121–24; Buddhist story of the poisoned arrow illustrative of its emphasis on practice and distrust of speculation, 120–21; Epistle of James on inseparable conjunction of faith as inner, and on works as outer aspects of religion, 111–12; external lives of cannot substitute for the inner dimension of faithful commitment, 113; final outcome of meditational practice in Buddhism is elimination of the distinction between the inner and the outer, showing both to be illusory, 120; four basic foci of the meditational path for attainment of nirvana in Buddhism, 118–20; inwardness and outwardness of all religion, 11; inwardness in nontheistic religions, 117–21; inwardness of God’s life shared with the inwardness of human lives, 116; inwardness of meditation in Buddhism, 120; inwardness of worship and prayer in monotheism and in bhakti yoga as expression of in Hindu polytheism, 114; Jesus’ white-washed tombs and Sermon on the Mount as indicating the crucial importance of authentic inner religious lives, 113; meditational and theistic types of religion, 11, 113–14; Moses’s encounter with God indication of God’s being personal, albeit awesomely so, 116, 127n3; nirvana as ultimate goal of Buddhist practice, 117; outer aspects

Index

of religious lives flow from and give expression to the inner ones, 125; outward practices of religion deeply informed by inner spirit and commitments of it, 111; the Psalms of the Jewish Bible as giving great stress to the inner life of prayer and devotion in Jewish monotheism, 114–17; science’s focus on the externally observable, predictable, and testable complemented by religion’s strong focus on the inner life, 111; Thich Nhat Hanh on different but complementary kinds of inwardness in Christianity and Buddhism, 113, 127n7 Robinson, Marilynne, 79–80, 121; see Morality Safina, Carl, 56, 57, 59, 108–9n1 Science, its external approaches inadequate to capture the inner lives of biological organisms of all kinds, 20; inescapable role of individual freedom in its practices, 2; inner sources of scientific thought not reducible to outer perspectives, 2–3; its search for a single, external, in-itself reality, 1–2; and machine model of reality, 10; theoryladenness of experimental tests in, 2; undeniable benefit and value of, 88 Scruton, Roger, 87; confines his analysis and concept of persons to humans (and God), 89, 127n3 Secular faith, 112 Self, human, its awareness of the external world, 9, 36–40; its awareness of itself, 40; its capacity for rational analysis and genuine agency, 9. 41–42; differs only in degree from nonhuman selves, 46; its freedom or agency, 42–46, 47; a function of the human body, 9, 31, 35, 46; “soul” as identical with

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“self,” 32, 35; the unique value of each individual self’s firsthand awareness of itself and of its world—for itself, for others, and for society, 40 Soul, see Self Sperm Whales, consciousness of, 56–60; obligations toward one another, 89–90 Subjectivity, the seat and arbiter of all understanding, 87; see also Inner and Outer Tanakh, 114, 127n2 Thich Nhat Hanh, see Religion Time, creates new kinds of reality via evolutionary emergence, 97; mechanical processes take time, 97; necessary for distinction of effects from causes, 97 Tool-making; see Consciousness, its relation to tool-making Thompson, Evan, 5, 17–19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 29, 31, 35, 52, 64, 67, 99 Wedbush, Sydney, vii Wegner, Daniel M., 44 Welby the cat, 49–50 Welby, Lady Victoria, 14 Wilczek, Frank, 92–96, his definition of “particles,” 94–95; on physics alone as describing the one true world, 93. 94–95; on the primary properties of matter, 92; Wordsworth, William, 39 World(s), not arbitrary constructs or sheer inventions, 16, 67, 134; all meaningful worlds are interpreted worlds, 11, 37, 65, 93, 129; Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Iliad, and digital computers analogous to the interpretive characters of all worlds, 6–7; the blue heron’s world contrasted with but also partially commensurate with

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our human world, 4–5; celebrating this value, 138–40; claim that the shared common world is best described by physics (Wilczek), 92–93; crucial role of experience in the framing of world views, 27; divine solipsism not a desirable substitute for an inexhaustibly diverse perspectival world, 141–42; fallacious claim to a reductionistic scientific view of, 92, 95, 132–33; humans are not masters of the world, 135; idea of God’s-eye view of disputed, 11, 130–33; inner and outer are inseparably conjoined, 6, 9, 26, 40, 64–65, 129; interdependence of percepts and concepts, 16, 139; limitation of scientific descriptions of, 26; as many worlds as there are biological organisms in relations to their environments, 3, 67; made in coordination with selves, 48; meaningful worlds change with time, 11–12; a mixture of partial convergences and partial differences

of perspectives, 96; no objects without subjects, 133–35; no overarching purpose of, but ample purposiveness within, 99–100, 99n2; no such thing as a single, uninterpreted, completely objective world, 3–4, 9, 65; no world(s) without life and no life without world(s), 18; not all worldviews are equally plausible, 16; 27, 134, 137; obduracies and resistances of the experienced world as necessary tests of interpretations of it, 134; past interpretations can help to allow and direct innovative ones for the future, 134–35; plurality of worlds a metaphysical and not just an epistemological claim, 8; this idea not resolved by a supposed divine incarnation in the world, 130–31; value of multiple interpreted worlds, 135–38; views of world have continued to change with time, 137; world(s) include multifariousness of inner perspectives, 137–38

About the Author

Donald A. Crosby is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus of Colorado State University. His current main research interests are in the areas of religious naturalism, metaphysics, American philosophy, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. Crosby’s latest published book is Primordial Time: Its Irreducible Reality, Human Significance, and Ecological Import (Lexington Books 2020). Scheduled for publication early in 2022 is his book Sacred and Secular: Responses to Life in A Finite World (State University of New York Press).

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