To revisit 'The Silence of Animals' (2013), is to renew respect for Gray's approach to the big dilemmas. But what does he say about 'mind', you may ask?
" The myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world...has been renewed (from Socratic and Platonic mystical philosophy) in a garbled version of the language of evolution."
Gray cites myth and illusion as metaphors for the human condition - the second section of the book quotes Freud acknowledging that his theories were grounded in "our mythological theory of instincts", and that the death instinct (the internal force that seeks to undermine individual achievement and health, and that finally defeats every life) may be a myth.
He also offers a version of dualism, echoing Freud's inner conflict and Eros/Thanatos models to decry the possibility of any real improvement in how humanity interacts with the natural world. Why impossible ? Because humanity is always divided against itself.
Gray thinks both meaning and progress are illusory concepts, and we maintain them only by clinging to omnipotent fantasies. As a part of the animal world we need to accept our inability to understand why we are here.
Rorty (Philosophy and Social Hope 1999) is also pessimistic about the future of humanity. He considers 19th century European liberalism the peak from which we have descended, such that by the end of the 21st century liberal democracy will be faded memory.
To paraphrase Rorty, attempts to keep something like God alive in the midst of a secular culture (based on the myth of reason ) were disengenuous. And to substitute Kant's mind dependent world for a faith dependent one may be misleading if it is thought to be progress.
Is the concept of 'mind' the result of a belief in fantasy, a belief we depend on because of our hatred for the limitations of our reality, that is, our animal nature, awareness of our mortality and our painful inability to know what might be beyond us, or find meaning in our existence? Another possibility is that 'mind' is conjured out of fantasies of self importance derived from the first months of life, as Melanie Klein suggests, only later modified by awareness of others and concern for them.
'Mind' is a word, and therefore a symbol, subject to disagreement about what it means while it depends on context to lend it meaning.
Rorty writes, 'As Hilary Putnam, the leading contemporary pragmatist, has put it: "elements of what we call 'language' or 'mind' penetrate so deeply into reality that the very project of representing ourselves as being 'mappers' of something 'language-independent' is fatally compromised from the start."
Is 'mind' a conceptual space where we try to resolve inherent conflicts - a space for an attempt to reconcile the forces of life and death? Such an attempt leads to oscillation - optimism/pessimism, faith/materialism, knowledge and resistance to knowledge.
We always fight against the acceptance that Gray advocates, in company with the Buddha.
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