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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Article

Climate

Comment

Politics

27 November 2024

7 min read

Neighbours, nimbys, and politician power plays

Is there a politics that takes both love of the land and climate concerns seriously?

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A sign protesting a proposed wind farm stands on flat moorland.

A Scottish wind farm protest sign.

Richard Webb, Wikimedia Commons.

It was easy to forget the fury of the past few winters in the gentle light of the golden autumn which enveloped our corner of rural Aberdeenshire over the past month. The scars Storm Arwen tore through the landscape three years ago, toppling whole hillsides of trees, and the flood-soaked fields of last winter were hard to conjure when faced with the thousand colours that painted the landscape. The smoky green of pine forests in twilight, the shocking scarlet of apples my daughters picked from our neighbour’s tree, the little violet fireworks of elderberry clusters hanging above the path to our house, these chased away worries about the future and the past and demanding attention to the present. Amid this array, it was easy to see why Queen Victoria chose our corner of Scotland for her rural retreat over a century and a half ago. The changing of the season has something of the eternal, sacred, and inviolable in it. “Let the field be joyful and all that is therein; then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice,” sang the ancient Psalmist. Surely, if ever a land was obedient to this command, it was our valley’s, this October. Surely too, it is our duty to preserve it so that it can sing out for a thousand more such autumns?

This drive to preserve is evident in the signs that appear regularly on fences as you drive through our valley. “STOP MONSTER PYLONS” and “NO WINDFARM ON HILL OF FARE” they say in capital letters large enough to communicate their creators’ anger. Our valley, which connects the Highlands to the sea, is prime real estate for the sorts of development necessary to transform the UK economy, which still gets 77 per cent of its energy from burning fossil fuels, into one built on renewable energy. Our hills are ideal for turbines and our land must be crossed if transmission lines are to carry electricity from wind farms in the north to population centres like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and London. To many of my neighbours this sort of construction amounts to an industrialisation of the countryside, an irreversible scarring of pristine land in service of interests far away which care little for them. This view is common enough that almost all of the local village councils have expressed opposition to the developments. When my neighbours are characterised by senior government ministers as “the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists”, I suspect it only hardens their resolve.

It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

Sometimes I wonder if what politicians have in mind when they think of my neighbours are the sorts of toffs featured in Rivals for whom the countryside is a playground of upper-class indulgence. I am not rich. Neither are most of my immediate neighbours, many of whom rely on waiting tables at the local farm shop or cleaning holiday lets to make ends meet. My understanding is that most of the local farmers consider themselves lucky if they turn any profit at all from their long and exhausting hours. Every year we wonder if there will be enough pupils to keep our local primary school open. Every winter we prepare for the inevitable interruptions caused by power cuts, school closures, and unplowed roads.

If I had to guess at what keeps my neighbours here it is the land itself, watching and admiring it, caring for it, aligning the rhythms of their life to it. Autumn can be wonderful, but so too is spring. I drive to work past newborn lambs trying out their stilt-like legs, anticipate the sudden return of house martins to their nests under our eves, and enjoy weekend walks up the hillsides amid the sun-yellow mazes of coconut-scented gorse bushes. Each season land presents itself to us, demands our attention, calls for our admiration.

In the two creation stories of Genesis, what it is to be human is to be made in the image of God and to be given the task of tilling and keeping the land, respectively. A way of reading these together is that humans are to be priests to creation, recognising and praising its beauty and caring for it in a way which reflects God’s love for it. In my last article for Seen & Unseen, I discussed philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practices and how the human activities he identifies as practices can order and give meaning to our lives and communities. Another way of thinking about these practices is that they are all, in some way, an expression of this original edenic imperative, to see, to respond to, and to care for God’s creation. If this is true of any practice, it is perhaps most transparent in rural ones. It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

The practices we engage in have a way of becoming enmeshed with our identity in such a manner that it can be hard to imagine ourselves without them. That is why, I believe, opposition to wind farms and pylons runs so deep here, and why, as geographer Patrick Devine-Wright has demonstrated, attempts to offset the financial downsides of developments through local grant programmes and other compensation do very little to swing public opinion in favour of development. As he demonstrates, at the root of such opposition is an affective attachment to the land, one that money cannot buy away and which resists even the most well-reasoned arguments which attempt to ignore it.

And yet, I know, my neighbours know, that all is not well with the land. Although we draw sizable crowds on Easter and Christmas, the most packed I’ve ever seen our parish church was when a locally born climate scientist came to present his research on Antarctica. He walked us through what it is like to live there, how scientists survive the winters, and what they eat, but all anyone was interested in the Q&A that followed is what can be done about climate change. It is hard to ignore it. It is there in the good and the bad: in the pleasant, nearly tropical breeze that ushered my children from house to house on Halloween; in a mild winter making ticks and Lyme’s disease a regular visitor; and in the onslaught of storms felling fifty year old forests in a single night and cutting road and railway connections to the rest of Britain for days on end. If we are to keep these changes from becoming more extreme, if we are going to bequeath to our grandchildren a countryside with the beauties admired by Queen Victoria and countless others, we need to slow this change. We need to move away from fossil fuels and to renewably generated electricity and given that, as I said above, 77 per cent of our energy is still made by burning carbon, we need to produce not just a little more electricity, but a lot. The answer to the oft repeated question, “Wouldn’t these be better, if they were built somewhere else?” is that, yes, they will need to be built somewhere else and here, and in many other places, if we are going to get anywhere close to a carbon-free future.

The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

What might a politics look like that both took my neighbours’ attachment to the land and these realities seriously? What it shouldn’t be is one that castigates my neighbours for that attachment. That only feeds suspicions that what is really at play is an exploitation of the countryside to feed the excesses of the cities. Such exploitation runs deep in the folk memory of Scotland. The Clearances only lightly touched our valley, but a little travel here or there takes one by abandoned villages. Those who resisted then, clinging tightly to their land, also might have been called blockers, delayers, and obstructionists by modernising absentee landlords the sitting rooms of their Edinburgh townhouses, intent on replacing them with more profitable sheep.

However, the possibility exists for drawing my neighbours’ attachment to the land into the conversation about why these developments are needed. The land, the planet, is sick, and sometimes the scars of a necessary surgery are a price worth paying for survival. The alternative to roads rising up our hills to turbines and to transmission lines cutting through now fertile fields is a future of longer droughts, hotter heat waves, and more extreme storms, bringing with them infertile fields, forest fires, and landslides. The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

But for such a rhetoric to work, politicians need to be serious about everyone bearing someone of the burden of climate solutions, both here in the UK and across the world. It can be tempting to give up hope in this regard. More than one article about our area has cited farmers complaining about how what we do won’t really matter anyway since China and India will burn away any positive effects of renewables here. But there are problems closer to home too. When UK governments and traders gush about the possibilities of new, power-hungry technologies like AI and cryptocurrency it can give any discussion of net-zero an air of unreality. Turbines and transmission lines can be part of caring for the land and can be shown to be in continuity with those other practices of care, but if other changes aren’t made, they will be as useful as a keyhole surgery on a patient who is bleeding out.