In Defense of the Human Being

A book review

In Defense of the Human Being: Foundational Questions in Embodied Anthropology
Thomas Fuchs
Oxford University Press, 2021

Both modern philosophy and modern psychology began with René Descartes and his theory of mind-body dualism, which holds that the mind is an immaterial substance, res cogitans, and the body is a material one, res extensa, yoked in some mysterious manner. Few thinkers hold this exact theory anymore, but there are modern descendants of it that have become quite common among philosophers, neurologists, and popular writers.

One such heir to Descartes’ ideas holds that a person is divided, not into a mind and a body, but into a brain and a body, with the brain being the true self. This view is practically a truism today. On this view, in parallel with Descartes’s, we do not have contact with the “outer world” but only with what our brain causes us to sense. Another theoretical heir, more bizarre, claims the brain is basically hardware while the mind is like the software it runs. The most extreme version says that the personal identity can be uploaded into another “device.” In both views the body is dispensable as far as personal identity goes.

These two modern variants of Cartesian dualism are the main targets of Thomas Fuchs’s In Defense of the Human Being. His response to them is that humans are embodied and cannot be understood in any other way. While the idea of the embodied self goes back at least to Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the terminology of “embodiment” is only about 35 years old. The way Merleau-Ponty puts it is “I am my body.”

Just as the self is not a disembodied mind, for Fuchs it is also not a disembodied brain. In his philosophical anthropology, the whole, bodily, human being is the self. Brains do not perceive representations of things in the world; rather, people perceive actual things in the world. Brains without the use of sensorimotor skills of the body do not perceive anything. And the body is not a mere marionette of the brain: “When I dance a waltz, I do not set my limbs in motion from the outside but I myself am the one who dances.” (p. 110) Fuchs regards the brain not as a homunculus, a little person inside the big person, but as a “mediator” between bodily movement, the environment, and perception. This is his version of the contemporary theory known as enactivism.

Fuchs spends a lot of time addressing the claims of the so-called transhumanists who believe that minds are computer programs. He begins by deconstructing the concept of “information” which has gone from meaning just a message written and read by a person to being regarded as a disembodied unit of meaning. It is this elision that underwrites the notion of mind as program and leads to the notion of mind uploading, which Fuchs regards as the “ultimate triumph of mind over matter, digital immortality.” (p. 16) After this he turns his attention to dismantling the concept of artificial “intelligence.” Two of his subsequent chapters are “Persons are not programs” and “Programs are not persons.”

Fuchs is after big game in this book, which addresses nearly every issue in the field of philosophy of mind. For example, he takes on the problem of how we know other people to have minds., which he solves by saying that since the self is embodied there is no inner mind to go looking for; you can see other embodied people sharing space with you. Even babies recognize the emotions of their parents. It does not depend on them holding a theory. (p. 5)

He supports the idea of free will, and although he admits that he cannot give a “final answer” as to the relationship of free action and neurophysiological processes. (p. 125), he does disentangle the issue from dualist appeals to the immaterial self. His theory, which I think we have to regard as tentative, is that if we want to understand a person’s actions, we should not look at just his brain but at the embodied person as a whole with his or her life history. He addresses several arguments against free choice in some detail. In the end, however, his major defense of the doctrine of free will is that it is our clear intuition and that the burden of proof is on the determinists. “To think and understand oneself as a being that obtains its possibilities of development from the future and that is able to grasp them in an ever new way—this seems to me to be the core of an image of the human that is worth standing up for.” (p. 142)

Fuchs is a psychiatrist as well as a philosopher. He is the Karl Jaspers Professor for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry at Heidelberg University and chairs the research section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at the Psychiatric University Hospital Heidelberg. He deals with mental illness in a section of the book. He offers the dismaying claim that studies of the brain have been of almost no help in diagnosing or treating psychiatric problems. He seems to favor looking upon such ailments from the subjective point of view of the patient. After all, as he points out, brain states don’t cause grief; loss causes grief. (p. 184)

Thomas Fuchs

This all sounds well and good, and he is no doubt correct that there has been too much reductionism in the medicine of the “mind,” but at the same time it does seem that progress has been made in correlating neurotransmitters with emotional dysfunctions and in helping people by affecting those chemicals. Perhaps I do not understand Fuchs’s position: he seems to think that interfering with neurotransmitters for the sake of individual treatment is acceptable, but that using chemicals, brain implants, and the like to improve human nature is questionable. Perhaps his animus against transhumanism is getting the better of him.

One of the few areas of the book that I find problematic is Fuchs’ invocation of the concept of intersubjectivity. I believe he is correct that the embodied self shares and needs to share space with other embodied selves, but he goes beyond this to say that the objectivity of our perception is only guaranteed by it being shared by other subjects. For example, according to this idea, I only know the wholeness of a tree because another person could in theory look at it from the other side. I see no reason to add the second perceiver to the situation. Coconut trees were objectively real to Robinson Crusoe before Friday or even a hypothetical Friday came along. (see p. 166) This view seems to reflect the influence of Merleau-Ponty.

In the end, it seems that Fuchs has a larger agenda than just philosophy of mind. His battle against the specifics of modern Cartesianism is only part of his larger war on the scientific (or scientistic) worldview’s encroachment upon human beings. Fuchs is, if anything, a humanist and is at every turn concerned with contemporary efforts to reduce or eliminate lived experience, empathy, natural rhythms, and the like in favor of numbers, information, neurons, programs, brains barricaded in skulls, etc. He is worried by the imposition of the artificial upon man: “Repeatedly, we are faced with the threat of de-couplings from natural foundations and their limited (or only cyclically renewable) resources, be they of the biological environment or the individual and his body. Such de-couplings of time orders manifest themselves in ecological or economic crises, as well as in individual overexertion and illnesses.” (p. 228)

This almost sounds like a denunciation of industrial society, but Fuchs does not explicitly go in that direction, no matter what he may privately believe. What he is fundamentally opposed to, he makes clear in an article for The New Atlantis, is the narcissistic oscillation between thinking of ourselves as technological gods and thinking of ourselves as wretched beings who have killed God. Whether Fuchs believes in God as anything more than a cultural artefact, I do not know.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in philosophical anthropology, the embodied self, or the brain. It is not impenetrably technical, although it is written at a level above popular treatments. It brims with references to thinkers from Plato to Ray Kurzweil. I have found it to be a good source for many such authors. Its calm style is only a cover for its passionate concerns.

I discovered this book only after extensive searching for an author whose ideas and concerns paralleled my own. The closest I had found before was the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose 1943 work The Phenomenology of Perception is a landmark in the field. But Merlau-Ponty does not address all of my questions and could not have dealt with certain problems such as the brain as computer or the brain in a vat (the Matrix problem), because they had not or could not have been posed in his time. Furthermore, I do not find him very readable, which makes him of limited use to me.

There are other “enactivists” who, like Fuchs, believe that consciousness has be understood in terms of the embodied self and its environment. I’m not quite sure how that theory plays out, but there is a tendency among some of the enactivists to “super-size” the mind, saying that, for example, a pencil and paper are actually part of the mind when they are being used and not mere tools.

This view is not emphasized in Fuchs’s book, but in a speech he said that consciousness cannot be localized, but is distributed among the brain, body, and environment. I disagree with this view as I understand it. Persons are conscious, and the outer limit of the self is the skin. To take a recurring example, even though the brain incorporates the sensations transmitted by the blind man’s cane in such a way that he feels with the tip of the cane and not with his hand, that does not make the cane part of him, and with the mildest of effort and he can feel with his hand if he chooses. I am not sure whether Fuchs is consistent on this subject.

Fuchs in a general way shares the theory I call personal holism, about which I have written a major essay that I will publish in a few weeks and which will be the centerpiece of my forthcoming book, although he doesn’t seem to use a compact label for his version of it. Perhaps he would call it a theory of embodiment or embodied enactivism. Other than his relentless opposition to the idea of the brain as the self, two major things that Fuchs does for me are: 1. he takes on the transhumanists, whose strange notions I had been neglecting, and 2. he frames the issues we both address in humanistic terms, which I have only done a little. I will surely be referring my readers to Fuchs’s insights.

All in all, In Defense of the Human Being is a real find.