People have wondered what people are since the very earliest times. Two thousand years ago, a typical answer was, Human beings were originally created as divine beings, similar to God, but sinned, were thrown out of Heaven, and became flawed beings, doomed to mortal life, to constant toil for survival, and eventually to die. In Plato’s view, all materiality was an imperfect and corrupted shadow of the Ideal truth which existed only in our mental understanding.
Today, we have a somewhat different view. Medicine studies our nature as physical bodies, enumerating with ever increasing detail the component structure of that body and the flaws and defects that can arise with it, how to repair it, and how to perfect it. Yet medicine has a primitive idea of consciousness. For a doctor, a patient is conscious when it responds to stimuli, when it speaks, when it can answer questions. This definition of consciousness is little more than “irritability,” or responsiveness.
Psychiatry, developed in the middle of the 19th century, studies the mind, but only in a limited way. Based on the work of Freud and others, the mind is conceived as a pathological organ obsessed with fears and repressed desires. Its proper function is to integrate into society and to serve authority. A healthy mind seeks employment, obeys its boss on the job and in the office, has friends, cooperates with social peers, and is docile to the government. The aims of psychiatry are complete when the patient has given up its existential anxieties and returned to normal function as a cog in society. Psychiatry is anti-philosophical because it would prevent us from questioning the roles and purposes given to us by the extant social context.
Psychology is a science that studies the mind as an object of enquiry. It may be a precursor to developing a science of psychiatry that is based on facts rather than conjectures. The psychologist, though, is ill-equipped to understand the nature of humanity because he does not see himself as part of it. There have been cases of psychological studies which amount to torture. One scientist undertook in the 70’s to find out the limits of brainwashing and launched experiments intended to wipe out his subjects’ memories and replace them with ideas he implanted. He used massive doses of LSD and daily electro-shock treatments to break down the person’s memories and confuse them. Survivors of his experiments are alive today, and cannot remember the experiments nor any part of their lives prior to it. Clearly a so-called scientist who can treat people this way is missing some element of humanity in his own make-up, and is no more able to understand the nature of Man as it has developed into modern civilization, where a sense of rapport, empathy, and compassion for our fellows is a normal practice. If this position seems extreme, the work of Pavlov and B F Skinner are enough to support the view that even commonly accepted psychology has attempted to display man as robot.
Other sciences intending to study Man are sociology, archaeology, anthropology, and history. History especially places the question of Man into a long-term chronological and narrative context, noting what he has done, what he has accomplished, and from the point of view of his practices throughout time, what is important to Man. All sciences, though, fragment our view of man, providing only part of the story and ignoring the rest within its own purview. After reviewing the sciences, one has a scattered and haphazard picture, wih no guidelines for how to re-assemble the real Man out of it.
Religion and philosophy are two other approaches to understanding our nature. Religion introduces the notion of Spirit, or Soul, to go along with body and mind as properties of our Being, but this concept hasn’t been rationalized to fit within the scientific scope, so, while it is important to a great many people, it plays no part in our formal understanding of human nature. Philosophy is the only other study that has the potential ability to put Man in a complete context of Body, Consciousness, and Meaning.
Because our greatest concern as living entities is our own nature — we want to know who we are, what happens when we die, why we are here, what is the purpose of life, how and why we should act — it is to philosophy we have to look, to render a complete and integrated picture, to criticize the answers sciences suggest, and to guide the questions being asked. In that regard, I think the studies of consciousness and the philosophy of mind are among the most important studies being done today.
