The power of imagination that makes a novelist seldom goes together with the analytical abilities needed to be a philosopher. George Santayana wrote The Last Puritan (1935), a bestseller and also a fine novel, but in this as in many other respects the Spanish-American philosopher was highly unusual. There have been very few novelist-philosophers, and in recent times most of that small number – the business-class Nietzschean Ayn Rand, for example – have been noteworthy for the childishly primitive quality of their thinking.
One of the great writers of fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson (for Gilead, in 2005) may be the only living novelist who has made a genuine contribution to philosophical reflection. Comprising four closely reasoned and richly imaginative chapters based on a distinguished lecture series at Yale, Absence of Mind is one of the most thought-stirring inquiries into fundamental questions that has appeared in many years.
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, by Marilynne Robinson, Yale University Press, 158 pages, $25.50
Robinson aims to clarify the relations of science with religion, a subject on which it might seem difficult to say anything that is at once new and illuminating. She succeeds not by defending religious belief but by examining the claims for science made by enemies of religion. Her target is not science itself, but the “para-scientific” ideologues that claims to explain consciousness in reductively materialist terms. Most influential among these ideologues, Richard Dawkins and his followers have argued that the ability to turn back on oneself and look into one’s thoughts, a type of “inwardness” that seems peculiarly human, is an accidental product of natural selection.
Absence of Mind is a gush of fresh air in the controversy over science and religion
Demonstrating a command of the history of ideas that few contemporary philosophers can boast, Robinson argues that this neo-Darwinian attempt to supply “the one thing needful, the one sufficient account for literally everything” is only the latest in a long line of similar efforts, none of which can properly account for what she describes as “the great fact of human exceptionalism.”
Writing with forceful elegance, Robinson shows how in the reductive ideology that animates much recent evolutionary theory, “reflection and emotion are only the means by which the genes that have colonized us manipulate us for their purposes.” She argues persuasively that when human experience is explained in this way, phenomena such as altruism are reduced to “illusory sensations,” a conclusion that goes against the experience and testimony of humankind.
