The New York Review of Books has a lovely article about Antonio Damasio’s new book. One of the problems with mind-body theory is that the central question—is the mind an actual entity, an ‘I’, or merely an epiphenomenon—is largely inaccessible to science and even thought. Consequently dualism, monism, and the subsidiary positions are as often as not matters of dogma and aesthetics.

As with all aesthetic arguments, questions of semantics and vocabulary become paramount. When reading Aristotle for the first time I was struck by the amount of purpose that pervades his physics. Things are constantly striving to be what they are, and teleology is permitted to explain the behavior of oak trees, bees, and humans. That language has more or less disappeared, thanks to Descartes, Newton, and Hume, and as a scientist in training I found it very odd indeed that the Physics could possibly have been called that when Artistotle’s methodology permitted non-material explanations.

It would be a great mistake, however, to conclude that just because Aristotle talks about material and final causes in the same sentence, that the ancients actually placed them on the same footing. As Auden says, it’s impossible to say exactly how reverent any dead culture was before its gods, whether Priapus was venerated or snickered at. Romanticism and Enlightenment created a division (or exacerbated one that arose during the Reformation) between material and metaphysical explanations, one with which we are stuck even today.

If anything, the divide has broadened, and there are any number of people who are stuck entirely on one side or the other, either rejecting all metaphysical explanations as pop psychology and unsubstantiated rubbish, or else favoring astrology, self-help, crystals over rational investigation.

As Ian Hacking, the author of the NY Review article, points out, ordinary people live ordinary lives in which the internal, personal, metaphysical world—the one in which one sees people and their motives, not mental images and constructs—is rarely in contradiction with the mechanistic explanations for human behavior that science generates. And it’s true that science tends to illuminate and modify the vocabulary. But science and its vocabulary also tend to drive a wedge between material and final causes, pushing people to one side or the other. A similar division happened in Christian theology somewhere between Aquinas and Luther, during which changing definitions of causality split the old synthesis of Grace and Nature and left Western civilization with fears and convictions that led to a great deal of despair. But that’s another essay.