Modern science and the demotion of mind
A much more powerful ground of opposition to the ethos of idealism, as well as to many of its principal themes, was the fact that it was simply too much at odds with the rising tide of scientific progress in the late 19th century. If its most authentic inspiration was to show that the relation of “mind” and “nature” is one of a dialectical tension in which neither can wholly subsume the other, in actual practice it all too often sounded as though it were celebrating an absorption of the natural world by “thought.” Idealism was, therefore, at a decisive disadvantage in its relation to naturalism, a philosophical position closely attuned to the culture of science. Furthermore, naturalism dominated the thought of the 20th century and showed little interest in the traditional themes of philosophical anthropology and even less in the mind-centred conception of human nature with which philosophical anthropology was identified.
The most powerful and influential opposition to these ideas came from scientific developments that appeared to show conclusively that the exceptional status accorded to human nature had been invalidated. Three such movements of thought had an especially significant effect on the way human nature was coming to be conceived: the Darwinian theory of evolution, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the development of artificial intelligence (AI). These movements could hardly have been more different from each other, and while many would refuse to accord any real scientific status to Freud’s theories, it is hard to deny that, at the very least, psychoanalysis identified a stratum of human thought and experience that had never been incorporated into prevailing accounts of human nature. What is important here is the fact that, however different these three movements may have been, they shared a strong inclination toward demoting the conscious mind from its privileged position within human self-understanding and assigning a determining role to some very different part of human nature.
Evolution
In the first instance, the theory of evolution claimed that the various species of living things have a natural rather than a divine origin. These species evolve through random changes that occur in their members, though these changes themselves are not per se inheritable, as the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had supposed. In one way or another, such changes can influence an animal’s chances of survival and of reproducing itself. In this way, a process of natural selection takes place from which the human species itself emerged.
As a theory of human nature, evolution had a humbling effect on the pride associated with claims that humans held a privileged status among living things. Yet it did not have any direct bearing on the traditionally held distinction between the body and the mind. It was, in fact, hard to imagine what further influence evolution could have in the human case without appealing to changes that in one way or another would be of a mental character. All of this made evolutionary thought more of a threat to religious beliefs than to philosophical accounts of human nature, because the latter did not require any special assumptions regarding how the human species was formed.
Yet when evolutionary theory joined forces with genetics, as it did in the 20th century, it became possible to point to something within the human body—genes—that accounted for the heritable traits and mutations that occur in humans and in all living things. The inference has been widely drawn that human genetic makeup determines matters that had previously been thought to be controlled by rational thought and moral decision making. Now that the human genome has been completely sequenced, it may appear as though all the categories that have defined moral personality have been displaced by DNA, the organic chemical in which genetic information is encoded.
This at least has been the popular understanding of these developments, and apparently that of some professional students of these matters as well. Some of the latter have gone so far as to claim that the only meaningful possibility of human self-transcendence is that of passing one’s own genes into the next generation. These developments have been carried further by the emergence of evolutionary psychology, which equates the mind with the brain and views it as progressively modified by the same kinds of evolutionary changes that occur in all living things.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory has had a similarly displacing effect on human self-understanding. Although Freud originally conceived psychological processes in terms of energy exchanges within a physiological system, his mature theory was couched in a language of mind and consciousness that he modified for his own purposes. Since he was talking about matters of which humans are not normally aware and which cannot, therefore, be located in consciousness, he was forced to postulate the existence of what he called the “unconscious mind.” On its face, this term—normally used in its abbreviated form, the unconscious—is an oxymoron, since consciousness, understood as awareness, has always been the defining attribute of the mind.
This fact has sometimes been thought to justify a peremptory dismissal of Freud’s entire project. But it would be a mistake to deny on a priori grounds the reality of the facts to which Freud was calling attention. The issue is rather one of finding an appropriate way of conceptualizing the kinds of facts that have been described in this way—a way that does not entail these incongruities. Neither Freud nor his followers appear to have been interested in conceptual issues of this kind. Psychoanalytic theory has continued to deal in facts about intentions, motives, and feelings as though they belonged to a rather mysterious realm of which humans—in their “conscious minds”—remain quite unaware. As a result, a rather crude picture established itself of the conscious mind operating under the control of an external agency. At least in the popular understanding of Freud’s views, this further discredited even the ideal of rationality in human affairs by interpreting anything people might say as being mere surface manifestations of some unavowed and unconscious motive.