Summa Contra Condescension

• Published in: PsycCritiques Vol. 56; no. 15; p. No Pagination Specified
• Main Author: Cardeña, Etzel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Psychological Association 13.04.2011
• Subjects: Altruism; Brain; Cognitive Processes; Conscious (Personality Factor); Freudian Psychoanalytic School; Human; Human Nature; Mind
• ISSN: 1554-0138; 1554-0138
• DOI: 10.1037/a0022787

Reviews the book, Absence of mind: The dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self by Marilynne Robinson (see record 2010-09519-000). This book is a response to some authors who have advanced a simple answer to all the mysteries in human life and declared sacrilegious any questioning of its dogmas and out of bounds any observation that may run counter to its canonical texts. I refer, of course, to dogmatic “evolutionism” and materialism. In an introduction and four chapters dealing with human nature, altruism, the Freudian self, and a summing up of her position, Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer and other prizes, offers an impassioned defense of the conscious self and returns fire against its casual dismissal by some of the usual suspects: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sigmund Freud, Steven Pinker, and Edward O. Wilson. Robinson is a Christian who uses her belief not to demean rationality or empiricism but to demand a deep engagement with all of the aspects of our being and to reject ideological but scientific-sounding (what she calls parascientific) answers to vexing questions. She makes clear that she is not against science but against scientism as an unreflective metaphysics and scientific modernism as a totalitarian ideology. Absence of Mind is pervaded throughout by William James’s thoughts on the self and the relationship between mental event and brain processes (e.g., James, 1898). Although Robinson does not mention James’s lucid discussion of how the correspondence between psychological and neural events can as easily accommodate the view of brain as a transmissive or permissive medium of consciousness, rather than as a causal agent, she criticizes the facile acceptance of the dogma that brain events cause consciousness. Instead, she calls for probing into the deep mysteries and complexities of both material and psychological processes. Robinson’s thoughtful challenge to biological reductionism should especially appeal to those who take consciousness, the inner life, and culture seriously. I would just add that nonhuman life also provides examples of the joy and mystery of experiencing and altruism, whether in the jump of a dolphin or in an animal’s tender care for another of a different species. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)