Review

Books

Culture

Epistimology

Psychology

24 January 2025

8 min read

The provocateur philosopher who wants to wean us off the junk food of popular science

David Bentley Hart serves up meat on mind and matter.

Isaac Frisby

Isaac is a PhD candidate in Theology at Durham University and preparing for priesthood in the Church of England.

Cupid and Psyche by François Pascal.

Simon Gérard via Wikimedia Commons.

It will be immediately obvious to the reader of David Bentley Hart’s new book that the structure is quite different to most other titles on the philosophy of mind.

Hart admits that in its original form it was in fact far longer than its substantial 500 plus pages, but, in a perhaps inspired move, it has undertaken a metamorphosis from the ponderous-tome genre of philosophical discourse to one much older: the dialogue.

Instead of other such works which draw on an enormous and panoramic amount of literature presented in regular academic style with copious footnotes, Hart has opted for intelligibility in the mode of a dialogue between characters, historically most notably deployed by Plato. For this reason, it works well as an audiobook, as well as printed text. The downside to this format is that Hart has opted for a somewhat unfortunate weighting of three-on-one. Whilst this format makes the twist and turn of the at times obstruse argumentation more accessible, the impression can feel somewhat unbalanced. Hephaistos, one of those in dialogue, sometimes cuts a lonely and sympathetic figure, and his opponents sometimes are slightly too self-satisfied. This is not overwhelmingly so, but it is worth remembering that all voices are Hart’s.

His choice of dialogicians is telling - four Greek divinities. Psyche (soul), the mortal woman made divine by love. Eros (love), the divine lover of Psyche, Hermes, Psychopomp (that is, the guide of souls in the afterlife). And the stolid Hephaistos, god of craft and manufacture, the main antagonist as the advocate of all things materialist and physicalist. Three characters signal Hart’s intent to guide the reader into a new realm beyond the mundane; the fourth is the mouthpiece of this mundanity. Together in a garden, prompted by a plucked rose, they discuss some the deepest questions of mind, matter, and life.

The title, All Things Are Full of Gods, is a quotation attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales. Like Thales, Hart wants to argue that not only is the divine a reality but is in fact the ground of all things. The six days of dialogue cover the full gauntlet of metaphysical debate over the nature of reality.

On day one, ‘Mind, Life, and Pictures of Reality’ the gods set up the groundwork of the reductionist materialist physicalism (RMP) perspective and the older pictures of classical philosophies.

Day two, ‘Mind and Matter’, draws the battlelines between the qualitative difference between mind and matter.

Day three, ‘Brain and Mind’, engages with arguments concerning how mind and matter relate.

On day four, ‘Machine and Soul’, the place of mind in the body is deepened in the debates on computationalism and functionalism and a useful unpacking of the limitations of panpsychism, which is currently seeing a revival in philosophical circles.

Day five, ‘Soul and Nature’, sees the dialogue broadened to nature itself, reconsidering the mechanical paradigm which presently dominates.

Concluding, day six, ‘Nature and Supernature’, is where Hart delivers his final case, having thoroughly prepared the ground, arguing that mind characterises all of reality and that this is ultimately the only truly rational account of being.

In an important ‘Coda: The Age of the Machine’ Hart addresses the problem of evil, something largely absent from the rest of the work. Hart has a good track record on this topic: The Doors of the Sea, written in light of the Boxing Day Tsunami, is essential reading for Christians and others who see the paradox between an all-loving, all-powerful God and the presence of suffering and evil. Readers will have to decide for themselves; it is not a topic on which one may enforce an opinion either way. The discussion concludes on the sixth day, “. . . and on the seventh day they rest.” (483)

Whilst All Things is dialogic, it also appears to be something else: catechesis. Hart is a catechist. Theologian and philosopher also; linguist certainly; provocateur undoubtedly. But the intention of this book is to catechise the reader, to induct them into the mystery of mind and reality. This might be a somewhat dusty word to some, implying the rote learning of religious dogma. Others will be barely aware of such a word. In Christianity, catechesis is the process of instruction, usually conducted through question and answer.

Hart is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, though in many ways an unorthodox one. His commitment to a form of perennialism, his belief that many of the major religious philosophies of the world (Vedic, Greek, Jewish, Christian, Islamic) share important and compatible insights into the nature of reality and God as the primordial ground of all things, is evident through the pages of All Things. This is unsurprising as he states that of all his writings All Things is the natural successor to The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (a deliberate allusion to the Vedic concepts of sit, chat, ananda) in which he sought to argue the rational coherence of a theism shared by a number of the great religions over and against the irrationality of modern physicalist materialism. It is worth reading and would certainly give the reader of All Things a primer for the extended discussion.

But how is it exactly catechesis? Hart wants to wean the reader off the junk food of popular science with its tendency to not take questions about its philosophical basis very seriously, especially in how its epistemology, ‘what it knows’, produces its ontology, ‘what exists’. This deficiency, as Hart is keen to point out, means that often ontology secretly precedes epistemology. For instance, most scientist will take central place of mathematics within their discipline for granted, without acknowledging that mathematics is itself is groundless: it is epistemologically irreducible as it is not empirical, but is ontologically essential to the scientific method. Hart argues that it is in it’s very groundlessness and givenness to intelligibility, i.e. that the world can be understood at all, that means the world in fact shows itself to have rational mind-like structure, capable of being known. Many advocates for RMP will simply shrug and say that we’ve simply evolved to see structure which isn’t inherently there; Hart is here to pick a philosophical bone with them. His intention as catechist is that, even if one does not become a Christian at the end of this book, one can no longer remain in the comfortable and familiar philosophical milk of the dominant RMP paradigm but be stirred to hunger for the meat of reality. Although not an explicitly Christian book, there are certain hints. A number of Christian theologians recur, especially towards the end: Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Meister Eckhart. That the dialogue is set over six days “. . . and on the seventh day they rest” (483) ought not to be lost on the reader.

His position in a nutshell is that all is mind or spirit (this linking of terms that are separate in English derives from their indistinction in the German Geist, used extensively in German Idealism, in which a lot of this debate has its origins in modernity). This is not a denial of matter (as in some forms of idealism), but that matter is a material manifestation or substrate of the principle of mind behind all reality: God. In many ways All Things is the extension of his previous book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which he acknowledges in the ‘Introduction’. His position is argued in response to the currently most dominant intellectual paradigm, RMP: the idea that reality consists only of that which is matter or can be observed as a consistent mechanical attribute of matter (such as gravity).

Hart’s argument rests on a number of fallacies in this paradigm; the most important of these and the one which recurs most frequently throughout the dialogue between the gods is the ‘pleonastic’ fallacy:

No matter how many purely objective quantitative steps the supposedly mechanistic material order may have taken in the direction of mind, none of them seems as if it could have constituted that sudden qualitative transition from pure exteriority into an unprecedented inwardness.

In short, quantitative accumulation cannot produce qualitative transformation. Mind is not another form of exterior reality, like the physical world; thought takes up no space and is of an entirely different, interior order. This is Hart’s principle complaint against both RMP and historical forms of dualism such as that of Descartes. The six ‘days’ of dialogue is essentially an account of the various arguments presented by the RMP paradigm to demonstrate that this fallacy is not in fact true. The most important of these concerns the trend in various sciences to speak of ‘emergence’: the appearing of qualities or realities such as mind which, whilst dependent upon a physical foundation for their existence, cannot be understood or explained by examination of their physical foundation; they cannot be reduced (explained) by the substrate. Hart draws the distinction between water’s property to extinguish fire, despite it being made up of the highly combustible elements hydrogen and oxygen, and the emergence of mind as a different order of reality from physical combination:

Physical properties derived from other physical properties—no great problem there. So long as this is all that’s meant by “emergence,” then the concept is as inoffensive as it is obvious. But there’s a point at which vague talk of emergence is just another way of talking about something that you might otherwise justly call magic.

This is because water’s watery-ness is also a physical phenomenon, the product of the combination of these particular elements in this particular configuration. But this is still and exterior reality; mind on the other hand is not a property like the watery-ness of water because mind is an interior phenomenon, one which is entirely inaccessible except for the mind who is the mind in first-person perspective. To then argue that pure exterior accumulation quantitative of reality can produce this interiority is, to Hart, not only nonsensical but irrational. Part of his argument thus also turns upon the principle of Occam’s Razor: “if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one,” as Chris Simms describes it. With some of the arguments from RMP approaching this almost ‘magical’ solution, Hart is at pains to argue that indeed the simplest explanation for the mind-like structure of reality is that it is indeed Mind.

I believe this to be a crucial book in the ongoing dialogue between philosophers and theologians on the one hand and the sciences on the other. The project of pointing out the philosophical problems with the dominant paradigm is a difficult when the other side rarely wishes to listen; Hart, however, is a voice that cannot be ignored.

All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, By David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press.

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Community

Culture

Generosity

Psychology

21 March 2025

7 min read

Is empathy really a weapon?

Musk and Fonda disagree on whether empathy is a bug or a feature.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A montage shows Elon Musk wielding a chain saw, Jane Fonda flexing her muscles and Hannah Arendt smoking.

Wordd Wrestling Empathy.

You may have heard that you can kill a person with kindness, but in recent weeks have you also heard that you can bring about your own death through empathy? In an interview recorded with podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Elon Musk added his voice to a cohort of American neo-capitalists when he claimed, “We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” and went on to describe empathy as having been “weaponized” by activist groups.

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

In recent weeks empathy has become one of the hot topics of American politics, but this is not the first time that Musk has shared his thoughts about empathy, and it should be noted that on the whole he is not really against it. Musk identifies, rightly, that empathy is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and in previous interviews has often spoken often about his vision to preserve “the light of human consciousness” – hence his ambition to set up a self-sustaining colony of humans on Mars.

But he also believes that empathy is (to continue in Musk’s computer programming terminology) a vulnerability in the human code: a point of entry for viruses which have the capacity to manipulate human consciousness and take control of human behaviours. Empathy, Musk has begun to argue, makes us vulnerable to being infected:

"The woke mind virus is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general. Empathy is a good thing, but when it is weaponized to push irrational or extreme agendas, it can become a dangerous tool."

Strangely, on certain fundamentals, I find it easy to agree with Musk and his contemporaries about empathy. For example, I agree that empathy is essential to being human. Although, far from empathy leading us to “civilisational suicide”, I would say it is empathy that saves humanity from this fate. If consciousness is (as Musk would define it) the brain’s capacity to process complex information and make a rational and informed choices, then empathy, understood as the ability to anticipate the experiences, feelings, and even reactions of others, is a crucial source of that information. Without empathy, we cannot make good decisions that benefit wider society and not just ourselves. Without it, humanity becomes a collection of mere sociopaths.

Another point on which Musk and I agree is that empathy is a human weak point, one that can be easily exploited. Ever since the term “empathy” was coined in the early twentieth century, philosophers and psychologists have shown a sustained fascination with the way that empathy causes us to have concern for the experiences of others (affective empathy), to think about the needs of others (cognitive empathy), and even to feel the feelings of others (emotional contagion). Any or all of these responses can be used for good or for ill – so yes, I agree with Musk that empathy has the potential to be exploited.

But it is on this very question of who is exploiting empathy and why, that I find myself much more ready to disagree with Musk. Whilst he argues that “the woke mind virus” is using empathy to push “irrational and extreme agendas”, his solution is to propose that empathy must be combined with “knowledge”. On the basis of knowledge, he believes, sober judgement can be used to resist the impulse of empathy and rationally govern our conscious decision making. Musk states:

“Empathy is important. It’s important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."

What I notice in this system is that Musk places knowledge before empathy, as if existing bits of information, “fundamental principles”, are the lenses through which one can interpret the experiences of another and then go on to make a conscious and rational judgement about what we perceive.

There is a certain realism to this view, one that has not been ignored by philosophers. The phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, Stein – those who first popularised the very idea of empathy – each described in their own way how all of us experience the world from the unique positionality of our own perspective. Our foreknowledge is very much like a set of lenses that strongly governs what we perceive and dictates what we can see about the world around us. The problem is: that feeling of foreknowledge can easily be manipulated. To put it another way – we ourselves don’t entirely decide what our own lenses are.

To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, another great twentieth century thinker, Hannah Arendt, explored how totalitarian regimes seek to control not just the public lives but also the thought lives of individuals, flooding them with ideologies that manipulate precisely this: they tell people what to see. Ideologies are, in a sense, lenses – ones that make people blind to the unjust and violent actions of a regime:

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists."

A big part of the manipulation of people’s sense of foreknowledge is the provision of simplistic explanations for complex issues. For example, providing a clearly identifiable scapegoat, a common enemy, as a receptacle of blame for complex social and economic problems. As we know all too painfully, in early twentieth century Europe, this scapegoat became the Jewish people. Arendt describes how, whilst latent antisemitism had long been a feature of European public life, the Nazi party harnessed this this low-level antipathy and weaponised it easily. People’s sense of foreknowledge about the “differentness” of this group of “outsiders” was all too manipulable, and it was further cultivated by the Nazis’ use of “disease”, “contagion” and “virus” metaphors when speaking about the Jews. This gave rise a belief that it was rational and sensible to keep one’s distance and have no form of dialogue with this ostracised group.

But with such distance, how would a well-meaning German citizen ever identify that their sense of foreknowledge about what it meant to be Jewish had been manipulated? Arendt identified rightly that totalitarian systems seek to eliminate dialogue, because dialogue creates the possibility of empathy, the possibility of an exchange of perspectives that might lead to knowledge – or at least a more nuanced understanding of what is true about complex situations.

When I look at Musk’s comments, I wonder if what I can see is a similar instinct for scapegoating, and for preventing dialogue with those who might provide the knowledge that comes from another person’s perspective. In his rhetoric, the “woke mind” has been declared a common enemy, a “dangerous virus” that can deceive us into becoming “anti-merit” and “anti-human.” In dialogue, those who claim to be suffering or speaking about the suffering of others might be enabled to deploy their weaponized empathy, trying to make us care about other, to the potential detriment of ourselves and even wider humanity’s best interests. Therefore, it is made to seem better to isolate oneself and make rational judgements on behalf of those in need, firmly based on one’s existing foreknowledge, rather than engage in dialogue that might expose us to the contagion of wokeness.

Whilst this isolationist approach appears to wisely prioritise knowledge over empathy, it misses the crucial detail that empathy itself is a form of knowledge. The experience of empathising through paying attention to and dialoguing with the “other” is what expands our human consciousness and complexifies our human decision making by giving us access to new information. To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.

In these divisive and divided times, there are, fortunately, those who are still bold enough to make the rallying cry back to empathy. At her recent acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award, actor and committed Christian Jane Fonda spoke warmly and compellingly in favour of empathy:

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy, and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”

Fonda’s use of the tent metaphor, I’m sure, was quite deliberate. One of the most famous bible passages about the birth of Jesus describes how he “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word “dwelt” can also be translated “tabernacled” or, even more literally, “occupied a tent” among us. The idea is that God did not sit back, judging from afar, despite having all the knowledge in the world at his disposal. Instead, God came to humanity through the birth of Jesus, and dwelt alongside us, in all our messy human complexity.

Did Jesus then kill us with his kindness? No. But you might very well argue that his empathy led to his death. Perhaps this was Musk’s “suicidal empathy.” But in that case Musk and I have found another point about empathy on which we can agree – one that is summed up in the words of Jesus himself: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

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