The Physical And The Mental

In ancient times, personal experience was everything. The truth of the matter is, that nothing is more present to us than the direct, phenomenal encounter with the world, or what is known as 'phenomenal consciousness'. Everything comes to me as this rich internal existence. Nothing is closer to me than my own mind, and indeed all that is exterior to that mind is received in and through it. Putting aside the question of pan-experientialism, what is surely true is that for me, at least Whitehead is right. Apart from experience there is nothing, nothing, nothing bare nothingness.

It makes some sense, then, that ancient peoples would seek to explain the physical in terms of the mental, or rather spiritual. That everything happened by the will of some Higher Being, made a lot of sense, since mind seems to each and every person, whether they realize this or not, as the more ultimate fact of life. The physical, then, was thought to be grounded out in the mental. Projecting mind, I think, is less about some evolutionary trick than simply about the fact that everything we encounter in the world is within the field of the experiential, and therefore the mental.

The scientific revolution did us a great service by ending this picture. Man is not the measure of all things. It is humbling, in a rather morally significant way, to realize that our mental life is not the field in which the physical take place but is rather something that exists within the very midst of the physical. We are physical beings, as much as we are mental beings. And the universe is a physical place. Focusing on the physical, an account of how physical systems worked became possible. We realized that physical events take place because of physical laws. It is the physical that explains the physical, not the mental. My physical existence is not explained by some appeal to some mind, but by realizing that I am a part of a physical universe. The story of what I am, of where I came from, is really the story of the entire cosmos. This is one of the benefits of adopting 'a view from the material'. I know now that my physicality, my being here physically, is the result of me sharing in the physicality of the universe. I exist because the universe exists, and my physical life, all that I am as an object is the result of my sharing in the materiality of the universe.

The problem with this view is that we now have little place for persons, for real minds within that system. Most scientistic thinkers have a hard time, if not an impossible time, fitting phenomenal experience into their picture of the world. Many deny the very existence of experience, which to me is tantamount to cutting off your pant legs and celebrating that you fit them into your suit case. Experience remains the most present part of life to each and every person. We need room in our worldview for persons, and not just physical bodies.

Thinking about the universe as having a mind, or being a person, makes some sense of this for me. Just as I participate in the physical nature of the universe, I can also participate in the mental. Mind, too, is for me a field in which I live. My consciousness is part of that which God is whole. Each and every thing's story is the story of the whole of existence. If this is true when it comes to the physical, if my physical existence is a participation in the physical existence of the universe itself, might not my mental existence similarly be a participation in the mental life of the whole?

We can see, too, then why ancient peoples were able to have some access to the mind that is over all and through all, for their focus was always on the consciousness that was so present to them. Their lives were mental lives first and foremost. We have gotten to the point where we focus more on material existence. But an either/or is not necessary here. We are physical and psycho-spiritual. Our story is the story of the Universe and of God.

All explanations end somewhere. Describing a falling ball in the context of a universal gravitational force leaves out the explanation of where that universal force came from. For the scientist the laws are the end of the story. They are brute facts, requiring no explanation. But it doesn't change the fact that the motion of the ball is now explained, and that a great many phenomenon remain now explained by the appeal to the universal law of gravitation.

Mind, too, may be best explained by appealing to a universal fact. God, universal mind, just is. It is as brute a fact as the existence of the physical laws. But explaining my own mind as participation in this Greater Mind does have explanatory value. Pan-psychism is an explanatory vision, then. But it is not science. For science is about the physical and the 'without'. Religion and this type of the philosophy of mind is about the psycho-spiritual, and the within.