“All those gleams and flashes of the
highest awareness and, hence, also of the 'highest mode of existence', were
nothing but a disease, a departure from the normal condition, and, if so, it
was not at all the highest mode of existence, but, on the contrary, must be
considered to be the lowest”
Dostoyevsky, The Idiot.
The Idiot
rates pretty low for me as Dostoyevsky's novels go, but the quote above has stuck with me for years. It is one of those rare sentences that hints
at a fundamental term of human experience. What I mean by a 'term of human
experience' is something that would appear in a user manual for living, were
such a thing to exist. It would be found somewhere under “you will die”, “you
will feel how others see you” and “the mere existence of Simon Cowell will
annoy you beyond endurance”. Heidegger called such things 'existentialia', but
I don't like using a word I can't pronounce, so I'll refer to such things as
'Terms' with a capital 't'. Were I to state tersely the Term that Dostoyevsky's
sentence suggests, I would say - “the highest mode of existence is also the
lowest”. That's a bit gnomic and obscure, so let me put it in plain English.
Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky's wryly named
'idiot', suffers from a neurological illness we would currently recognise as
epilepsy, arguably, temporal lobe epilepsy. It is believed
Dostoyevsky suffered from this condition, and several of his novels feature a
sufferer thereof. In keeping with the symptoms of the illness, the Prince's
seizures are often preceded by a kind of ecstasy characterised by a sensation
of profound enlightenment and clarity. “His sensation of being alive and his
awareness increased tenfold at those moments... All his agitation, all his
doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great
calm, full of knowledge of the final cause... For the infinite happiness he had
felt in it, it might well be worth the whole of his life”.
The Prince is no idiot, of course, and he
is possessed of the inclination and ability to critically analyse his own
experiences. He does not and cannot doubt that this experience is
genuinely “beauty and prayer, that it really was the highest synthesis of
life”, but “the reality of the sensation somewhat troubled him all the same.
What indeed was he to make of this reality?” For as our chosen quote explains,
the same experiences that reveal to him the meaning of his life are also just
the abberant and accidental activity of his diseased brain. We might say that
the experience the Idiot values most in his life is, in its objective reality,
an aberrant brain event, a mere glitch, a case of neural wires getting crossed.
It is a neurochemical accident without meaning or significance. It may seem
real to him, more real than anything else. But why should a neurochemical
machine undergoing electrical contortions be regarded as an organ of truth?
When the provenance of an epiphany turns out to be something so mundane and
contingent as brain cells firing wildly, the subject of that experience is
surely wise to qualify the assertions by which he expresses it – or perhaps
dismiss them altogether, as pathological.
But there is no reason to limit the
epileptic’s perspective to abnormal or pathological experiences. We are each of
us a chemical machine, as the physicist Schrödinger put it. The leading
thinkers in contemporary philosophy of mind will tell you that, however your mental
states should be understood in the last analysis, they must be rooted somehow
in the activity of the brain. Ultimately there is nowhere else for them to
inhere, nothing else that can produce or ‘realise’ them – the precise phrasing
will depend on the terms of the theory you opt for. Personally, I believe the
difference between mental states and brain states is merely one of perspective.
There is but one state, which through introspection has one appearance, while
through a microscope or MRI assumes another – just as an object appears
variously when apprehended through different senses. Whatever way we want to
state it precisely, we must acknowledge the mind's basis in the brain, unless
we cast reason and evidence aside and believe in some 'Casper the ghost' type
of entity; a non-physical soul that, while it occupies no space, can none the
less manipulate my body, connected incomprehensibly to its ontological
opposite. No – every experience you have can only be a neurochemical stirring
in your skull.
Hence, when you think of the greatest
experiences of your life, that form or ground the meaning, purpose or logical
centre of your life, you can think as the Idiot thinks. This highest mode of
existence - this great or pivotal experience - is also the lowest thing, tiny
cellular signals harried or lulled by chemicals in a simmian skull, of no more
significance than some subterranean crawling revealed on an upturned rock.
Indeed, every act of valuing is such a surging in neurochemical soup, every
occasion of human valuing in history has been such a low thing. The Idiot's
dilemma applies to all of us and to humanity as a whole. It a consequence of
our being composed of cells. It is one of the Terms.
Now you might say that the fact that these
neurochemical events in our skulls are the ground of meaning makes them
important, imbues them with significance, with the highest significance. After
all the brain is about the most
complex entity we have encountered in the universe. Shouldn't we be
impressed by its workings? Of course, we're into a knotty problem here, because
what we're talking about is the business of applying the values that inhere in
the brain to their own basis or substrate. The brain in question is party to
the dispute. But it is instructive here to think about the provenance of this
brain's nature. Where did it come from and how did it come to have the design
it has? It's nature proceeds from evolution through natural selection, of
course. And what kind of beginning is that? Can we attribute significance,
meaning, worth to the process of evolution? Does evolution have an agenda we
can respect? But of course, it doesn’t really have an agenda at all. Biology
produces mutation, and if any particular example of that mutation is fit to
survive long enough to propagate its type on this particular ball of bacteria,
that type will have some perpetuity. Like the rest of our genetically
determined nature, our basic cognitive and emotional repertoire is the product of
mutation weeded by a world indifferent to the needs of its tenants. It is that
control system that proved to be adaptive, where other mutations were less so.
It is what was left after nature’s cull of the maladaptive. Eventually, after
millions of years and a lot of failed experiments it produces incredibly
complex systems exquisitely adapted to their environment, but these remain the
products of chance regulated by death. Understanding the designer of the human
brain does little to edify its status as the ground of all values.
I think it comes down to this question: can
we look critically at the basis and origins of our nature, and of our
experiences, and still take them seriously? I pose that not as a rhetorical
question, but as one each must answer for his or herself. We are each of us
left in just the same position as Dostoyevsky's Idiot, and there is no eluding
his dilemma.
