Read Online Who Am I and If So How Many? by Richard David Precht - Free Book Online
Authors: Richard David Precht
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considered radical. He was also an agnostic who liked to take on the Church. Physicists and philosophers grappled with Mach’s theories, and Mach’s philosophy was much in vogue among Russian intellectuals ; the young Lenin wrote a thick book about it. Sense physiology arose as a new discipline, and American behaviorism was inspired by Mach. But no matter how many sciences Mach had helped shape, his fame faded quickly after his death in 1916. World War I shook Europe to its very foundations, and physics now pursued a different path. In 1970, NASA commemorated the nearly forgotten pioneer in rocketry by naming a lunar crater after him.
Mach’s philosophical ideas were radical. He considered valid only what could be verified in experience or in calculations. In examining everything to ascertain its physical correctness, Mach dismissed nearly the entire history of philosophy. He found particular fault with Descartes’ dualism, because Mach was convinced that sensations in the body and ideas in the mind are one and the same. As a young man on that summer’s day,everything had seemed to join together, and in that same spirit he merged the dualism of ‘I’ and ‘world’ into a monism in which everything in the world consists of the same elements. If they appear in the brain, we call them ‘sensations,’ but that does not mean they are demarcated from the world outside the mind.
The focal point of Mach’s theory of sensations was the death of the ‘I.’ For more than two millennia, philosophers, like most other people, had used the word ‘I’ to refer to themselves. But Mach deemed this usage problematic. What might this ‘I’ be? ‘The ego,’ he asserted, ‘is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity.’ There is no ‘I’ in the human brain, only a jumble of sensations in the animated exchange with the elements of the outside world. Mach quipped that a sensation could go ‘a-roaming by itself in the world.’ His most famous statement on the self is this: ‘The ego is unsavable. It is partly the knowledge of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious and philosophical absurdities.’
Mach was not the first to come up with the idea of eliminating the self or at least diminishing its significance. He had proudly believed that it took a physicist to arrive at his conclusions, but an unsuccessful lawyer and pensive merchant had done so long before him. The Scottish philosopher David Hume was twenty-eight years old when he published his Treatise of Human Nature in 1739. Hume’s quest for the self led nowhere, because soul and self were not tangible objects. Man does not need a self to perceive sensations, grasp concepts, and experience feelings; that happens all by itself. The self was nothing more than one idea among many. The only thing Hume could think of to rescue this self was to call it a ‘succession of perceptions’ – an illusion, though perhaps a necessary one, that gives man the pleasant (and indispensable?) feeling of having a supervisor in the brain.
Is that true? Is the self an illusion, nothing but mental hocus-pocus, even though we all think we have a self? Were Western philosophers fooling themselves for two thousand years when they confidently based their ideas on a self that grapples withthe important questions in the world? Isn’t our self the little attic room where all our intellectual, emotional, and intentional acts go in and out, the bastion that endures through all the vicissitudes of life, the uncut movie that guarantees I will regard myself as one and the same person throughout the decades of my life? Who in Mach’s and Hume’s name is talking to you right now, if not my self? And who is reading this book, if not you, who also address yourself as ‘I’?
So let us start by liberating the self once again from the stranglehold of oddball physicists and unsuccessful lawyers and
Mach’s philosophical ideas were radical. He considered valid only what could be verified in experience or in calculations. In examining everything to ascertain its physical correctness, Mach dismissed nearly the entire history of philosophy. He found particular fault with Descartes’ dualism, because Mach was convinced that sensations in the body and ideas in the mind are one and the same. As a young man on that summer’s day,everything had seemed to join together, and in that same spirit he merged the dualism of ‘I’ and ‘world’ into a monism in which everything in the world consists of the same elements. If they appear in the brain, we call them ‘sensations,’ but that does not mean they are demarcated from the world outside the mind.
The focal point of Mach’s theory of sensations was the death of the ‘I.’ For more than two millennia, philosophers, like most other people, had used the word ‘I’ to refer to themselves. But Mach deemed this usage problematic. What might this ‘I’ be? ‘The ego,’ he asserted, ‘is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity.’ There is no ‘I’ in the human brain, only a jumble of sensations in the animated exchange with the elements of the outside world. Mach quipped that a sensation could go ‘a-roaming by itself in the world.’ His most famous statement on the self is this: ‘The ego is unsavable. It is partly the knowledge of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious and philosophical absurdities.’
Mach was not the first to come up with the idea of eliminating the self or at least diminishing its significance. He had proudly believed that it took a physicist to arrive at his conclusions, but an unsuccessful lawyer and pensive merchant had done so long before him. The Scottish philosopher David Hume was twenty-eight years old when he published his Treatise of Human Nature in 1739. Hume’s quest for the self led nowhere, because soul and self were not tangible objects. Man does not need a self to perceive sensations, grasp concepts, and experience feelings; that happens all by itself. The self was nothing more than one idea among many. The only thing Hume could think of to rescue this self was to call it a ‘succession of perceptions’ – an illusion, though perhaps a necessary one, that gives man the pleasant (and indispensable?) feeling of having a supervisor in the brain.
Is that true? Is the self an illusion, nothing but mental hocus-pocus, even though we all think we have a self? Were Western philosophers fooling themselves for two thousand years when they confidently based their ideas on a self that grapples withthe important questions in the world? Isn’t our self the little attic room where all our intellectual, emotional, and intentional acts go in and out, the bastion that endures through all the vicissitudes of life, the uncut movie that guarantees I will regard myself as one and the same person throughout the decades of my life? Who in Mach’s and Hume’s name is talking to you right now, if not my self? And who is reading this book, if not you, who also address yourself as ‘I’?
So let us start by liberating the self once again from the stranglehold of oddball physicists and unsuccessful lawyers and
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