What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism

[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000]

In “Meaning and Representation”, Chapter 2 of the referenced book, Professor Freeman has a perceptive and intelligent discussion of the materialist, cognitive, and pragmatic views of the mind and most especially the mind of the self-aware human being. (It’s a matter of definition as to whether animals other than human beings, aware but not fully self-aware, can be said to have minds.) And, yet, something is missing in his classification. That something shows in his placing St. Thomas Aquinas in the category of pragmatist. I consider myself a Thomistic existentialist and most certainly not a pragmatist, though I think that methods of the pragmatists are the same as the ‘first-stage’ methods of Thomistic existentialism. I’ve criticized pragmatists, even those that I admire — such as William James or the brain-scientist Gerald Edelman — because of the inadequacy of a pure pragmatist approach to understanding the universe. Their bottom-up approach is the proper ‘first-stage’ to understanding Creation but they refuse to admit it works only if there is a world to meet them, a world in all its unity, coherence, and completeness.

Professor Freeman speaks of our environments containing only representations and not meanings while meanings and not representations are in our minds. Fair enough as a first approximation to understanding the relationship between a human mind and its immediate environments. The next step upward would be to see the world and then we can see the universe as the physical aspects of that world. This is odd because I’m putting the perception of the more complete entity ahead of the perception of its physical aspects.

The universe wasn’t a primary concept in human intellectual history. A world, in the form of a morally ordered cosmos, was seen before Einstein provided a firm description of a universe — all that is bound by a common gravitational field. How could a world have been conjectured before there was any scientific foundation for defining a physical universe? There was only the Cosmos and that was a mess. I have to confess that I myself often wrote as if the proper progression was from environments to universe and then to world, see To See a World in a Grain of Sand, in my writings until now. I don’t know for sure if that was an oversight or an outright error.

I’ll cut to the chase in this particular discussion of the pragmatic philosophy I admire so much as a great ‘almost’:

There is a world and there is meaning in that world. That meaning is inherent in this world which came into being as an object of God’s love.

As I define it, a world is the completeness of a universe seen in light of God’s purposes, but the ancient and Medieval thinkers saw God’s purposes though they saw them as imposed upon a Neoplatonic cosmos in which reason hovers over matter and imposes order upon it rather than seeing a rational world in which order was inherent. This is one way of looking at matters: the universe is not primary because it’s the physical aspects of a world which is unified and coherent and complete. God isn’t imposing His purposes upon a recalcitrant cosmos or universe. He’s telling a story which serves His purposes and the universe is the physical aspects of that story.

Despite Professor Freeman’s profound understanding of much of what St. Thomas Aquinas’ taught about the human mind — much of my knowledge came into focus under Freeman’s guidance, he fails to understand that Aquinas’ philosophy was subject to his faith and to his spirituality including his intense devotion to the Eucharist and to Eucharistic adoration. Or maybe Freeman thinks that theology can be stripped out of Thomism with no harm to its coherence and completeness and unity. In fact, Aquinas saw so far because he reached out to find meaning and found something that supplies far more meaning than a pragmatist could accept — a world. Thomism is the proper way of viewing God’s world though any particular Thomist and any particular version of Thomism is necessary incomplete and defective in some ways being the work of a creaturely mind.

In any case, we aren’t just bottom-uppers who construct meaning by building our own personal world. We go up from our bottom and find hints of a world which give meaning even to the emptiest regions of space and time. To get best results, we should let ourselves be guided by the Bible and by the Nicene Creed which draws some of the meanings from the story of Jesus Christ and puts them into catechetical order.

Professor Freeman tells us the world contains ‘representations’ and meanings are all in our necessarily isolated minds though we can struggle, with some significant success, to communicate our meanings to others and to understand the meanings that others have in their minds. There’s enough truth in this that this book can be profitably read to get a clear idea of (almost) what Aquinas really believed about human nature, moral and intellectual. And there’s a reason for this: both Aquinas and Freeman are clear thinkers who are willing to subjugate any preconceptions to observed facts of concrete human beings. Both move from empirical knowledge outward towards a world. Unfortunately, Freeman is true to the pragmatic tradition in refusing to acknowledge the existence of a world while borrowing a coherent framework of sorts from the intellectual traditions of the Christian West.

Aquinas believed in a world that had all the meanings put there by God and his explorations out into that world were regulated by his Christian beliefs. He most certainly didn’t believe that a Christian adoring the Body of Christ was looking at a mere representation which required him to construct a meaning. He most certainly didn’t believe that every adorer of that Body necessarily had a different understanding of the meaning of that wafer of bread become the Body of Jesus Christ. The meaning is there even when it remains beyond human efforts to render it in human language or human concepts. Our problems with meanings become a struggle to develop the language and concepts to express meanings that lie beyond us — certainly a much different situation than personal meanings in the minds of isolated human beings.

There is also another aspect of the human condition which is closer to Freeman’s understanding of meanings: each of us has a role to play in God’s story and, thus, we can access a part of the meaning of that story which is not directly accessible by any other human being. Yet, those meanings which are personal because of our perspective are no more, and no less, than a particular part of the story God is telling, the story which is our world, that is, the physical universe seen in light of God’s purposes.

Yet, there’s gold in those pragmatist hills, far more gold than there is in other modern philosophical traditions. The gold is there just because the pragmatists know to identify hills with gold in them by using their minds to explore empirical reality. Most modern philosophical traditions have taught us there are principles which rise above the mere empirical world and those principles tell us the necessary properties of hills which have gold and the places where gold must necessarily lie.

An empirical method, such as that of the pragmatists, will discover the truths which lie in the things and relationships between things in this world created by God. In one sense, Freeman’s categorization of Aquinas as a pragmatist is right. The better quality pragmatist thinkers, such as William James and Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman, can be seen as half-blinded Thomists who leave open the eye which sees things and creaturely relationships but close the eye which could see the meaning that is out there in God’s story and what it contains. Not seeing the meaning that is out there, they’re forced to construct meaning in their isolated human minds. Then again, being cultured and well-read men, they perhaps bring meaning into their thoughts from the traditions of the Christian West.