Review - Panpsychism in the West
by David Skrbina
MIT Press, 2005
Review by Louis S. Berger, Ph.D.
Nov 8th 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 45)

"The nature of mind has been an enigma since the beginning of recorded history. In many ways it is as much a mystery today as it was to the ancient Greeks." So begins David Skrbina's excellent comprehensive chronicle of the ubiquitous presence of panpsychism in the history of Western philosophy of mind.

Most of us have some idea of what panpsychism means but the term has been and still is defined variously and often ambiguously, and has numerous confusing near-synonyms (pp. 15-22).^[1] One author sees it as "any view that reunites mentality with materiality, and thereby dismantles the foundational dualism of Western thought".^[2] For Skrbina, a philosophy professor, panpsychism is, roughly, the position that "all things have mind or a mind-like quality....mind would exist, in some form, in all things...." (p. 2). He points out that panpsychists do not like to say that everything is "conscious," because that is a formulation that too easily is ridiculed; he wants to "avoid the most heavily anthropocentric terms." Rather, "the panpsychist asks us to see the 'mentality' of other objects not in terms of human consciousness but as a subject of a certain universal quality of physical things, in which both inanimate mentality and human consciousness are taken as particular manifestations" (p. 17). Skrbina's proposed functional definition is: "All objects, or system of objects, possess a singular inner experience of the world around them" (p. 16). Furthermore, as Skrbina uses it, panpsychism refers to 

a meta-theory of mind. It is a statement about theories of mind, not a theory in itself. It only claims that all things (however defined) possess some mind-like quality; it says nothing, per se, about the nature of that mind, nor of the specific relationship between mind and matter. (p. 249)

Panpsychism, then, has to do with the "enigma of mind"--a subject that these days is out of favor in most professional fields. While few thinkers now would go as far as to maintain eliminativistically that there is no such phenomenon as "mind," still, by far the dominant view in most disciplines and among the public at large is that in principle we do already know what "it is." The usual answer, of course, is some version of emergentism, the doctrine that mind is a phenomenon that (somehow) emerged out of inanimate matter in the course of the world's evolution. Never mind that we do not now know the exact details; mechanistic neuroscience will sooner or later fill in the missing gaps. We have an apparently reliable promissory note.

This is outright, question-begging scientism:

Nearly all present-day philosophers of mind [and nearly all scientists] are emergentists who assume that mind emerged [out of inanimate matter] at some point in evolution. Usually, however, they do not address the question of how such emergence is conceivable, and they do not acknowledge that one needs not assume this.... (p. 7) Mind in humans is an unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable, mystery to science. Mind that may exist elsewhere in nature is scientifically unintelligible and methodologically superfluous. Modern analytic philosophy supports both this view of mind and the mechanistic worldview generally, and hence sees no credibility in panpsychic theories....  Emergentism, in all forms, is ... profoundly incomplete at present.^[3]  This fact alone suggests that panpsychist theories deserve greater attention. (p. 185)

Typically, mainstream science and mainstream philosophy distort and ridicule panpsychism (see especially pp. 235-236), but the fact is, not only cannot neuroscience (and cognate natural sciences) explain mind (i.e., awareness, presence, consciousness) "at present," but no one even has offered any conception of how the quantitative sciences could explain "scientifically," ever, the qualitative transition that occurs when physical energy (including electro-chemical neurological activity in the body) is finally transformed into subjective experience (in the brain?). Apparently no one has the faintest idea about how such an explanation might look.^[4]  (But that hasn't prevented a near-universal acceptance of the emergentist, mechanistic dogma.)

So, in reality we have a choice of what amounts to two credos: panpsychism, or else emergentism in one or another form. Neither belief is incontrovertible, beyond doubt, at least not at this time. Panpsychism, however, does offer some advantages: "To account for the human mind/soul, the mechanistic [and/or emergentist] philosopher must resort to supernatural dualism, epiphenomenalism, or eliminativism" (p. 102)--all positions that have their own highly problematic aspects. Skrbina argues that panpsychism offers resolutions to problems that these mainstream schemas find intractable (and therefore typically evade). That is a major, but not the only, reason for its importance for philosophy (and potentially, I believe, also for science). Skrbina lists four more reasons: (1) panpsychism occupies a unique position in philosophy, (2) it has important moral and axiological implications (perhaps most especially ecological),^[5] (3) it "brings into sharp relief the nature of mechanistic philosophy", and (4) so far Western philosophy has severely underanalyzed it and has been inappropriately dismissive" (p.4).^[6]

Panpsychism has a unique and very old history in philosophy and in world views in general, and seems to reflect "a universal human impulse" (p. 3). Skrbina chronicles the complex history of the rise and fall of panpsychist worldviews. "The pre-Christian era acknowledged the presence of spirit and mind in nature. The Christian worldview took spirit out of nature and placed it largely, but ambiguously, within the monotheistic figure of God" (p. 58). With the Renaissance (sixteenth- and seventeenth century Europe) began the rise to dominance of a mechanistic, clockwork, machine view of the world with uneasy detours through dualism (especially the Cartesian mind-body dualism) to the current prevalent pseudo-monist reductionist scientific materialism. The key founding figure here is René Descartes, whose dualism "set the emerging scientific, mechanistic worldview on the track that it would follow for the next 400 years and beyond" (p. 85), but always "there was a persistent countercurrent of thought that was non-mechanistic" (p. 65).

Chapter 1 is a clear, comprehensive, intricate, highly detailed, informative and balanced overview that provides the background for this historical narrative. Most of the remaining chapters examine "in detail the evolution of panpsychist thought from the time of the pre-Socratics through the present" (p. 22). Chapters 2 to 9 present a valuable, instructive, broad, and thorough critical review of Western thought about mind, conducted from a panpsychist perspective. The chapters "demonstrate something of the breadth and depth of panpsychist thought over the past 2,600 years" (p. 250), revisiting and reanalyzing the host of arguments advanced for and against it over the centuries. The comprehensive compilation and discussions of a staggering collection of panpsychist positions, arguments, not only illuminate the subject matter but can serve as an encyclopedic reference resource.

The chapters cover: ancient origins; developments in the renaissance; continental panpsychism of the eighteenth century; panpsychism, mechanism and science in nineteenth-century Germany; the Anglo-American perspective; panpsychism, 1900-1950; scientific perspectives in the early and middle twentieth century; and, panpsychism from 1950 to the present.

The final chapter, "Toward a Panpsychist Worldview", summarizes and assesses the arguments presented for and against panpsychism. Skrbina concludes that currently its proponents and opponents have reached a standoff:

Those who are struck by an intuitive appreciation of panpsychism will formulate supportive and coherent arguments, or express their beliefs in poetic or metaphorical language. Those who find it impossible, unintelligible, and outrageous will offer their objections--without a whit of concession from the other side. (p. 265)

He notes that which side of the argument one takes will be a matter of personal style rather than the result of rational argument. That consideration ought to be particularly meaningful to psychotherapists, used as they are to seeing the ubiquitous but all too often misused application of rationality in Western thought. Specifically, they are thoroughly familiar with the pathological use often made of rationality (in used defensively via splitting, compartmentalization, denial, projection, identification, etc.). I am convinced that philosophy, and science too, could profit greatly from a better understanding and appreciation of the role that characterological and "irrationality" (pathological irrationality has its own obscure rationality) factors play in disciplines.^[7]

There may be a standoff, as Skrbina says, but on the whole the opponents to panpsychism have won the day: "the mechanistic worldview is deeply imbedded in our collective psyche" (p. 265). Yet, "several great thinkers were very explicit that they saw panpsychism as the foundation for a fundamentally new outlook on reality" (p. 267).^[8] Skrbina suggests that to proponents of panpsychism, the mechanistic, instrumental worldview which at one time was liberating now "has outlived its usefulness.... [It] took some 350 years before the negative effects became apparent" (pp. 265, 268), but reductive mechanism seems to have reached a terminal stage. Many would see that as an understatement: That worldview has launched and maintains us on a hugely destructive path. Thus, Skrbina's final comment:

We as a civilization need only summon our collective wisdom and courage, learn the lessons of history, and transcend the crude, destructive, and ultimately dehumanizing materialist worldview. (p. 269)

Skrbina proposes that panpsychism can provide the framework for an alternative and salvational world view. Still, he also proposes to retain quantitative science ("use of concepts from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics"--p. 240) within that forward development, but I am convinced that such an approach cannot lead to a truly liberating alternative. I have argued elsewhere at length that retaining any mathematical formalisms as the basis for one's world framework necessarily (though perhaps covertly) retains and maintains an anti-panpsychist, fundamentally mechanistic position.^[9] My own proposals for countering reductive materialisms go in a quite different direction.

In sum, Skrbina's book is a valuable, readable work. It may have too much historical detail for some general readers but even these could profit from a selective reading. Its implications go beyond philosophy and the natural sciences. Its general thrust fits in well with the growing serious critiques that oppose the inappropriate extensions of mechanistic, "propositional," rational-technological thinking to other fields^[10] including medicine,^[11] general psychology,^[12] ecology and ethics,^[13] or the mental health fields.^[14] I liked the book very much and recommend it highly to any reader interested in pondering alternatives to our depersonalizing, dehumanizing, mechanizing, scientistic, disenchanted and disenchanting worldview and practices.

© 2005 Louis S. Berger

Louis S. Berger's career has straddled clinical psychology, engineering and applied physics, and music. His major interest is in clinical psychoanalysis and related philosophical issues. Dr. Berger's publications include 3 books (Introductory Statistics, 1981; Psychoanalytic Theory and Clinical Relevance, 1985; Substance Abuse as Symptom, 1991) and several dozen journal articles and book reviews.  His book Psychotherapy As Praxis was reviewed in Metapsychology in January 2003.