The Mind-Body Problem

Some of the details she reported—what color robes the Cathar priests wore, for example—were at variance with accepted scholarly views but were eventually verified when the records of the inquisitors who had persecuted the sect were translated. Many of the names of the historically insignificant people the woman had described were also found in these records.

1. If a person is identical with his body, he would not survive his death.

2. If a person is identical with his body, he would survive his death.

3. So if a person is identical with his body, he both would and would not survive his death.

Since any proposition that entails a contradiction can’t be true, we can deduce from 3 that:

4. A person is not identical with his body.

A. A person is identical with his body.

B. A person doesn’t survive his death.

C. A person’s body survives the person’s death.

D. If a person is his body, then if his body exists, he exists. From A, C, and D follows:

E. A person does survive his death.

But B and E contradict each other, showing that you can’t assert A, B, C, and D. Since C and D are supposed to be obvious, the inference is that you can’t assert A and B; that is, if A, then not B: If a person is identical with his body, then he does survive his death: and that is precisely the conclusion to be proved here, the second premise of the first argument.

I don’t know what’s wrong. I haven’t given it much thought and I don’t intend to. There’s something wrong. Look, it took centuries to find out what was wrong with all those so-called proofs of God’s existence, that one that tries to show that God’s existence follows from his definition as all-perfect. It took centuries to find out what the fallacy was there. You’ve got to trust common sense before a priori reason.

The questions were now all of language. Instead of wrestling with the large, messy questions that have occupied previous centuries of ethicists, for example, one should examine the rules that govern words like “good” and “ought.” … No more dark, inaccessible regions lying beyond the reach of reason’s phallic thrusts. …

The philosophical mind has long craved a limited universe. The pre-Socratic Pythagoreans, in their table of opposites, listed “limited” on the side occupied by “order,” “light,” “good,” and “male.”

Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time?

Since we can discard these attributes even less easily than our clothes, we can always be strictly categorized according to the perceptions emanating from these areas: of who matters (the beautiful, the athletic, and the intelligent, respectively) and who doesn’t (the ugly, the flabby and the dumb). Contempt for the unfit is stronger, I think, than disdain for the plain. Perhaps because of the passivity of beauty? But no, intelligence is every bit as passive, a gift either granted or denied. And yet the scorn felt for the unintelligent is an almost moral outrage. Never mind that the dull can’t help themselves, that they would, granted the sense to do so, have chosen to be otherwise. Their very existence is felt as a moral affront by those of us who dwell where the genius is hero. The color of our zone is only just discernably lighter than the true black of those who perceive people according to their acceptance of some moral or religious or political code.

It’s a good thing, it occurred to me, that such errors as Dorothea’s don’t happen in math, where a proof is a proof whether of a theorem or of genius. (Casaubon was an historian of religion, his futile research on a Key to All Mythologies.) I, at the very least, had the real thing.

The greater the certainty of one’s results, the less the concern with others’ opinions of oneself.

Thus at the end of the spectrum occupied by sociologists and professors of literature, where there is uncertainty as to how to discover the facts, the nature of the facts to be discovered, and whether indeed there are any facts at all, all attention is focused on one’s peers, whose regard is the sole criterion for professional success. Great pains are taken in the development of the impressive persona, with excessive attention given to distinguished appearance and faultless sentence structure.

Any view that confers degrees of mattering, that distinguishes between those who matter and those who don’t, has no objective validity. We all count in precisely the same way. That’s the view from nowhere inside, the view from out yonder. And its contemplation beckons to me like a liberation.

Like all people in academia, I count my years the way the Bible does, from September to September. (Like schoolchildren, too—just one of the many ways in which the life of an academic is continuous with his childhood.)

A great difference. A theorem is obvious if it’s easy to see, to grasp. A theorem is trivial if the logical relations leading to it are relatively direct. Generally, theorems that are trivial are obvious. If the logical relations leading to it are straight, it’s easy to get to. And conversely. Thus the sloppy conflation of the terms.” He glanced darkly at Raoul. “But the meanings are different, as are the extensions. Sometimes the logical relations are direct but not so accessible. You know the old joke about the professor who says that something is trivial and is questioned on this by a student and goes out and works for an hour and comes back and says, ‘I was right. It is trivial’?Well, you couldn’t substitute ‘obvious’ for ‘trivial’ in that joke.

I hadn’t realized at the time the dangers with which I was flirting, the precarious nature of the world of property ownership we had almost entered: that world of intimate, complicated, aggravating relationships with painters, plumbers, carpenters, gardeners, and electricians. Much of the conversation at dinner parties was devoted to the intricacies of these relationships, the degree of sensitivity they required. And though they were always amusing tales, told with the lightness and gaiety suitable to the occasion, I could glimpse the soul suffering that lay behind, and always felt correspondingly grateful for a situation that allowed us to go running with any household woe—from a clogged toilet to a mouse in the pantry—to the kind and efficient people at the university housing office.

Lakewood has two identities. It’s a pretty little resort community, and it’s also the Princeton of yiddishkeit. Life there presents Judaism at its purest: the men learning in the elite kollel, which is like a graduate department for Talmud; the women producing children and also teaching or running little businesses in their basements to augment the meagre stipends the kollel pays their husbands. Some of the families actually live quite well, supported by the wife’s father. This is one of the great blessings of wealth, to be able to buy a scholar for a son-in-law and support him in the way of life one couldn’t choose for oneself.

I overheard a group of pubescent girls, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, chattering and giggling, and I caught the phrase “making out.” It startled me. I hadn’t heard the phrase in so many years. In fact, now that I heard it again I was surprised it still had a place in adolescent vocabulary. For the phrase is used by those who are teetering on the brink, approaching without yet plunging in to the inestimable depths; the plunge known in that same vocabulary, at least as it was employed in my adolescence, as “going all the way.” I hadn’t thought teenagers now hesitated on the other side long enough to have use for a phrase like “making out.”

How had I failed her this time? What maternal expectations was I once again in the process of thwarting?

And then I understood, saw it as I had never seen it before. My mother’s whole life is devoted to worry. …

Then a few weeks ago she had learned that Tzippy was pregnant, and now I was calling to tell her that I’m marrying. A Jew yet. No wonder she sounded wounded. We children had callously deprived her life of its substance and meaning. She was holding the telephone receiver and staring down into the existential abyss.

“Of course I’m happy,” she repeated weakly. “Overjoyed. Tell me, what is the young man like? What does he do? Don’t tell me he’s also a philosopher.” Do tell me, do tell me, her voice was begging.

And she is knowledgeable, too, admirably informed on current events: local, state, national, international—for all could adversely affect her family. She watches the news on television from four in the afternoon until eight in the evening, and then again from ten until twelve. If the phone rings at eight I know who is calling, to tell me to get rid of my house plants (a four-year-old has died from nibbling on a castor oil plant), not to answer the door (a man-and-son team has raped three women in northern New Jersey), not to make any plans to visit Seattle (a geologist has predicted that Mt. Rainier could go off sometime in the next twenty-five years).

But I didn’t give her a chance to finish her thought. “Mom, I’ve had it. You’re never satisfied. I give you a son-in-law, a Jewish genius son-in-law, you want a rabbi to marry us. I give you your rabbi, you want a party. I give you a party, you want me to go bobbing around naked in holy waters. I’ve had it. No mikvah, no party, no rabbi. Be happy you’re getting a son-in-law and an honest daughter.”

In the end, we were married by a justice of the peace in Trenton.

My mother had never commented directly on Noam’s age. She frequently chooses the medium of “the aunts” to make her points. Then, if I react very badly, she can say sympathetically, “Well, you know your aunts.”