I’m rereading Jerome Kagan’s Galen’s Prophecy about the struggle to make sense of such matters as temperament vs. character and the very nature of temperament. This is part of an effort to gear myself up to write the sections on heart in my upcoming book on human nature (mind and heart and hands). Since our empirical understanding of these issues is far from settled, I’ll be moving on to extend my overall narrative of Creation to encompass human nature, assuming that I can suggest a plausible overview that can help make greater sense of empirical facts, helping to turn them into knowledge and maybe greater understandings.
Many of Kagan’s lines of argument deal with the confusion and lack of stability in ideas about human nature which have been created by efforts to impose upon the human being some a priori categories. This has worked fairly well for thought, not so well for feelings and emotions. Modern thinkers can see the error in this if only by reading a book in anthropology which points out that the basic emotions posited by ancient Greeks are different from those posited by Chinese thinkers through the centuries. Malays and others have still other schemes. Professor Kagan presents some representative examples in his book. Modern thinkers have done such things as adding a heretofore minor emotion (sympathy, David Hume) in a perhaps misguided effort to reach a highly desirable goal—seeing the good in emotions.
Empirical investigators have found confusion rather than certainty in the early stages of investigating even a so seemingly fundamental—falsely so—concept as fear. Behavior and signs of emotion don’t even work as guides because similar behaviors and, say, facial expressions can be generated by different brain-states and biochemical states. Moreover, similar brain-states and biochemical states can lead to different signs and behaviors of fear and other, maybe, emotions. The issue of subjective awareness of our emotions, which follows rather than leading changes in our various states of being, has something of an explosive effect, destroying most signs of tentative order.
Interesting, but hardly surprising to one who advocates that novelistic attitudes and forms of story-telling are our best ways of higher-level understandings of the world and the more complex entities it contains. As I see it, conscious emotions are part of our efforts to construct narratives to make sense of what has happened or is happening or might happen.
Professor Kagan makes a general statement about one aspect of these issues in the preface:
Some psychologists resist acknowledging the contribution of physiology because of a worry that if they let the camel’s nose under the tent, he will soon be inside forcing all the residents to leave. I do not believe that the phenomenon of a shy or bold child will ever be understood with, or predicted from, physiological knowledge alone. Temperamental phenomena cannot be reduced to biology. Biological sentences cannot replace psychological ones, for the same reason that the language that describes the history of a hurricane will never be replaced with propositions descriptive of the single molecules of air and water in the storm because the former sentences refer to processes applicable to very large numbers of molecules. The camel will never become the only resident in the tent. [Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, Jerome Kagan, page xxi]
This is all very interesting and quite confusing since there is no way we now know about, as Kagan makes clear, to draw out any fact-based and plausible description of human emotions. He argues for the need to find such a description by empirical means; as I would say, we need to gather facts, analyze them and organize them into clean data and then into information, and then to create one or more systems of—perhaps competing—knowledge of human feelings.
I’ll put in somewhat different terms a claim I made above: we need to have some plausible understanding of the world as a whole in order to understand the moral characters and other complex entities which play a role in that world, the universe seen as a purposeful narrative. I wrote several essays over the past six years dealing with this issue. Six years ago, I did so by way of a highly respectful critique of Jamesian Pragmatism. See What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism. A couple months prior to publishing that essay, I had published one dealing with the refusal of Henri Bergson to explicitly admit the existence of a world which was both itself an entity and `container’ of entities, all of which which Bergson discussed with insight, even if I reject his overall conclusions. That essay can be found at Henri Bergson: Almost Seeing a World.
We should let the scientists do their work even as some of us start to construct worldviews considering what is solidly known about this world and, indeed, all of Creation and also what is plausibly conjectured. This is the realm of speculation, of the manufacture of glues to hold the mosaic together in tentative imitation of the unity which is to be found in this world and the greater unity to be found in all of Creation.
To do this and to help guide more specific and more empirical investigations, there is a clear need for a fresh understanding of being, what I, a Christian, would call created being. In terms used by Kagan in the quoted material: the camel has already entered the tent and he has two heads. Dualism is manifest as an ugly beast. Despite that analogy, it’s a more subtle and much more attractive dualism than such intellectual and moral atrocities as the software theory of the mind or the information (DNA) theory of human identity, but it is an implicit dualism. Any form of dualism will threaten the unity of created being which would allow us to properly understand our world and all of Creation. Dualisms began as systems with the a priori categories: `what we can understand by empirical means’ and `the rest of it.’ Nowadays, there are more subtle and sophisticated forms of dualism or even manyism.
What reason has Kagan to claim some ultimate truth-value in the categorization of human nature into a category subject to `biological sentences’ and a category subject to `psychological sentences’? He criticizes this way of thought when the a priori categories are more particular, such as any such categories of human emotions. What reason has he to even claim some ultimate truth-value in the categorization of atmospheric dynamics into a category subject to `sentences about molecules of air and water’ and a category subject to `sentences about the history of a hurricane’?
I think his instincts are right. He has good gut-level reasons to think as he does, but he’s made a fundamental error of reducing a question of the nature of being, or of particular entities, to questions about human knowledge or human language. This is the original sin which leads to a corresponding fragmentation of reality. The world is divided into categories defined, in this case, by the attitudes which have led to the accomplishments and dead-ends of analytical philosophy. And these categories, though more mutable, aren’t so much different from the substance-dualism categories of body-soul, matter-spirit. I address the general issue of the modern fragmentation of knowledge in the freely downloadable book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, where I argue, however inadequately at times, for the ultimate unity of created being and, hence, of our knowledge of created being.
In September of 2012, I wrote an essay, Physics, Politics, and Metaphysics, in response to an essay by Ken Masugi lamenting the tendency of modern political scientists to conduct only quantitative empirical studies to the exclusion of philosophical analyses and contemplations. I would recommend anyone interested in this subject to read my entire essay, but I’ll provide a quote summarizing much of my position:
In my critique of our general inability to understand created being, not just human politics, I’ve pointed to one way of expanding those limited understandings and maybe correcting those understandings by borrowing from those fields such as quantum physics and gravitational theory which have penetrated to some pretty abstract realms of created being from their particular viewpoints. Modern physics has shot past the limits on created being which traditional physics and traditional meta-physics had given us. We can expand our understanding of created being, including the possible sources of moral nature for a creature, and we can do that by trying to stand upon the foundations which physics and mathematics and other sciences have given to us and trying to see what lies beyond. What is the true nature of created being? Am I right when I say there is one spectrum of created being and that concrete being is shaped from relatively more abstract being itself shaped from still more abstract being and so on until we reach the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation? That is, am I right that we can consider matter as being frozen soul, in a semi-traditional way of speaking?
In other words, we should see depth of being in even the most concrete of nonliving objects and certainly in a human being. We see that human being as shaped from abstract realms of being which appear to us as layers `below’ his physical stuff. We also accept that all these layers of more or less abstract being come to us as manifested in that woman in front of us. The abstract is to be found in the concrete things which are shaped from the abstract as clay is still to be found in a vase. In Christian terms: as the Son of God became incarnate as a man, so does the raw stuff of Creation, manifested truths, become manifest as man. In many ways, the two complex events are quite similar.