Recently I’ve been musing metaphysically, and today’s article by Stephen J. Heaney on Public Discourse (“Just the Facts, M’am“) struck a chord.
Heaney picks up a story about a female college basketball player who has announced that she wants to be thought of as a man, not a woman. The reason is the usual one: because she feels like a man.
The university officials comply, as does the writer who reported the story to the local paper, all referring dutifully to her as him.
Here’s how Heaney puts the view that seems to underlie this episode: “If one’s feelings and desires do not conform to what is going on in the physical world, including one’s own body, then it is time for the world to change to conform to one’s feelings and desires.”
Heaney thinks this is silly, and undoubtedly it is, for reality stands in the way. This lead him to articulate what he takes (rightly) to be the classical view: “Human beings are primarily creatures of reason; we are fulfilled in seeking and finding the truth. It is a fundamental drive that we see manifested in the child who first learns to use language, and never stops as long as we live. Truth is the conformity of the mind to the reality of the world.”
But as I said, I’ve been musing metaphysically. Modern cultural theory presumes a naturalistic worldview, which means that all cultural phenomena must have naturalistic explanations. Insofar as language, morality, and even our conception of reality itself is cultural, it also must have a naturalistic explanation, which, when you start reading people like Durkheim, means boiling things down to some sort of human instinct, need, or desire. Sociobiologists take a similar tack, reducing our cultural categories to various instincts that have evolved to keep our DNA in play.
So let’s complete the thought. Reason is a cultural phenomenon (or at least that’s what modern cultural theory says, since all human phenomena are “cultural”). As such, reason is best explained as something arising from a more primary instinct, need, or desire. Nietzsche: truth is an army of metaphors at the command of will to power. Freud: it is sublimated erotic desire. Durkheim: truth is created by our need to escape from a fear of anomie.
If we return to Heaney’s formulation, truth is the conformity of the mind to the reality of the world, which when it comes to the human world, is instinct, need, or desire. Put simply: reality is instinct and desire.
The postmodern gurus like to dress up this metaphysical claim in arresting formulations. Thus Jacques Lacan, the influential mid-century French Freudian: “In truth, we make reality out of pleasure.” But I dare say it’s the basic assumption of all modern theories of culture. Get rid of final causes in nature, and all you have left for reason to discover is the network of efficient causes, which in the case of the human person is some species of desire.
Of course, the student, the university officials, and the news reporter in the episode Heaney recounts all commit the fallacy of composition. It’s not the case that my particular desires make reality, but rather human desires more broadly. Yet, it is important to see that the mistake is not metaphysical—at least not if one allows one’s views of reality to be shaped by modern natural and social sciences. And—given this view—is her/his outlook so unexpected? Our knowledge of efficient causes allows us to manipulate electrons in order to satisfy our desires, so why not human bodies? Why not human cultures? Why not words such as “male” and “female”?
There’s the rub, I think. Heaney stipulates that we’re primarily creatures of reason. I agree, but Heaney wrongly, I think, falls back on DNA and science to show how silly the episode is. But it’s not clear to me that “rational creature” means the same thing for us as it did for Aristotle and Aquinas and countless others when our tacit metaphysical assumptions permit no final causes.
OK, enough metaphysical musing. I’m surely out of my depth on this topic.
November 29th, 2010 | 1:11 pm
As C. S. Lewis observed, this is the dividing line between modern and pre-modern thinking: that whereas for pre-modern men, thought and desire must conform to reality, for modern (and post-modern) men, reality must conform to our thoughts and desires. (In this sense, then, Kant is THE philosopher of the modern age.) But this is the reason that I have always thought that it is modern secular humanists – not traditional religion believers – who engage in “magical thinking”, since, for us moderns, reality must follow our thoughts and desires. The whole presupposition, for example, of “politically correct” language is that using new words about things will magically transform not just human consciousness but reality itself. Thus, for me, it is the secular humanist that is living in a “magical bubble” and the religious believer who is truly in contact with reality.
November 29th, 2010 | 1:20 pm
I don’t think that all or most sociobiologists would agree that reason can be reduced simply to “desire” in the sense of mere feeling, instinctual drive, or conation. Moreover, even it it could be, our basic drives do have a connection to the reality outside our minds — and evolutionary modes of explanation have no difficulty in accounting for that. Hunger, for instance, is connected to the real existence of food and the physical fact that our bodies require energy to function. Animals that hungered for what did not nourish them or did not hunger at all would be at a serious disadvantage in the struggle to survive and reproduce.
Even brute animals have a kind of knowledge of reality, therefore, though not rational knowledge. They need this knowledge to survive and propagate, and so it is not really chargeable to sociobiology that it severs the connection between thought and reality. Quite the reverse is the case.
Consider the case of this young woman basketball player’s sexual confusion. Animals (including the “rational animal”, man) need to know the difference between male and female to breed. This woman certainly reduces her likelihood of propagating her DNA by thinking she is male.
The problem with sociobiology is not that it cannot account for our orientation toward reality, but that it cannot account for our ability to know supra-sensual reality, i.e. to know abstractly and rationally. It is true that knowing the difference between reality and mere appearance often requires reason. Therefore a creature trapped at the level of mere sensation and instinct would the more readily be fooled by appearance or feeling. By the use of pheromones, a male dog might be fooled into thinking that another male dog was a female. Humans, being able to think critically, have the capacity to understand where mere appearance and feeling are deceptive. Human beings who fail to use their reason, as this young woman basketball player does, are indeed functioning at the level of animal cognition — though an animal which is, from an evolutionary standpoint, not particularly fit. (From a basketball standpoint, on the other hand, doubtless extremely fit!)
In short, this woman’s confusion is hardly the fault of sociobiological or Darwinian thought. Indeed, a little more understanding of sociobiology might well do her good.
November 29th, 2010 | 2:55 pm
We do, however, change reality to meet our desires all the time, do we not? To take a simple example, we’ve gotten better over time at changing the reality of ‘unhealthy’ to ‘healthy’. We even change our own bodies. Whatever one thinks of cosmetic surgery, there’s reconstructive surgery to consider.
Just as a hypothetical – what if a tailored virus or nanotechnology were developed that could change an XX female to a biological XY male? Would the reality be that they were still female?
November 29th, 2010 | 3:34 pm
Ray,
I think your hypothetical an interesting one. I see an extension of the dilemma in the Harry Potter books. When I teach the course on World Religions, we begin with shamanism, and I ask the question, “What is prayer?”
Invariably, my students have a difficult time with the question, until I set another question beside it, “How is magic different from prayer?”
Weaned on the Harry Potter series, it is much easier for them to talk about wish fulfillment (magic)–the bending of the world to conform with one’s will–than to comprehend prayer.
Eventually I suggest that we humans have this flaw of sometimes treating prayer like Magic and turning God into a vending machine in the sky. But true prayer is the attitude of submission to the will of God (knowing it’s infinitely better than our own flawed desires), not a demand that reality bend to our own will.
I think it could be argued our “rational” culture actually tends toward the practice of magic more than ancient “primitive” cultures.
November 29th, 2010 | 8:04 pm
The only thing that Ray Ingles’ comments prove is that we moderns cannot do without some reference to reality (as a friend put it, “For Kant, can there really be a cure for cancer?”). But Mr. Ingles’ example is telling: yes, we may manipulate nature whereby we could truly change a female to a male. But the question arises: TO WHAT END? That is the crux of the matter: are there real purposes and ends in nature which we are bound to respect because, well, they are real? It is the banishment of final causes from nature without any good metaphysical reasons (there may have been good methodological reasons) that has trapped modern man in a mechanistic interpretation of the world, one that treats ends and natures as merely subjective prejudices.
November 30th, 2010 | 4:43 am
“The university officials comply, as does the writer who reported the story to the local paper, all referring dutifully to her as him.”
Why do they stop there? If a male basketball player, declaring himself a woman, wants to use the same changing rooms as the female players, on what grounds can they object? Or will he be a second class woman until (s)he has undergone hormone therapy and surgeons remove his “junk”?
If a student declares that he or she is a god and must be worshipped by all at the college or university, by what logic do the officials disabuse that person?
It is amusing to see woolly-thinking liberals tied up in intellectual knots. It is sad that such people are in positions of influence. I expect it will soon be called “hate-speech” to tell the female basketball player she is really a woman.
November 30th, 2010 | 5:58 am
Interesting that this post should appear the day before Fr. Schall’s piece, “Culture of Evil,” on today’s (Nov. 30th) thecatholicthing.com site. Evil can be made to appear good in culture and by legal sanction. The reality of the thing remains what it is.
November 30th, 2010 | 7:30 am
Heraclitus –
Well, are there?
Pointing out unwelcome consequences if something is false isn’t quite the same thing as demonstrating it to be true.
November 30th, 2010 | 7:44 am
BTW, for such ‘gender dysphoria’, don’t assume it’s all psychological. There’s a condition called ‘alien limb syndrome’, where an appendage, or part of one, is regarded by the sufferer as ‘not part of them’. Sometimes this goes to the point of suffers take Matthew 18:8 rather literally.
I recently read about a study that examined sufferers using MRI and the parts of their brains that ‘map’ the body, that encode one’s ‘body image’, did not respond to the ‘alien’ part. It’s quite possible the underlying condition is neurological, though it obviously has psychological ramifications.
It’s possible that there’s a similar underlying neurological reality in gender dysphoria that influences the desire, rather than vice versa.
Of course, a better outcome – for those with either condition – would probably be to reconcile the sufferer to the biological reality, to bring the neurology into line with the rest of the body. But the situation could be more complicated than “Desire Defines Reality”.
November 30th, 2010 | 10:11 am
Ray Ingles:
Yes, there are. A full understanding of nature, particularly human nature, demands final causes. This cannot be proven in a comments post and it is a fallacy to demand a proof in this space.
November 30th, 2010 | 10:11 am
Ray, there are a few big problems with trying to draw a comparison between phantom limb syndrome and “gender dysphoria”.
1) Phantom limb syndrome only occurs when a limb that used to be becomes amputated/lost. They “feel” the limb because the neurons that mapped to them haven’t yet died in the brain.
With the exception of an extremely small minority who were born hermaphrodites, those afflicted with gender dysphoria didn’t formerly have the sex organs of the opposite sex.
2) I’ve never heard of someone with “gender dysphoria” say “I feel a (phantom) penis/vagina” between my legs.” Even among those who were born hermaphrodites.
November 30th, 2010 | 11:20 am
Artaban – Phantom limb syndrome is different from alien limb syndrome. “Alien limb syndrome” is pretty much the opposite of “phantom limb syndrome”.
It’s when an existing, always-been-attached, otherwise healthy limb is perceived by the sufferer to be not part of them. To be, in a word… “alien”. And as I said, this can escalate to the point of… well, read Matthew 18:8.
November 30th, 2010 | 11:32 am
Heraclitus –
I didn’t demand a “proof in this space”. I simply pointed out that what was offered was not proof.
I wouldn’t mind having that conversation at some point, though. I’ve looked at more comprehensive attempts to prove that and found issues with the ones I’ve come across.
November 30th, 2010 | 12:06 pm
Ray,
Sorry for my misinterpretation in reading–I shouldn’t try and read & post during my break. As for “alien” limb syndrome (and to inject a little levity into the conversation), I pretty much think all men have a “limb” that doesn’t always act the way we want it to…in essence, “to not be a part of us”.
December 3rd, 2010 | 12:50 pm
[...] Desire Defines RealityFirst Things (blog)Durkheim: truth is created by our need to escape from a fear of anomie. If we return to Heaney's formulation, truth is the conformity of the mind to the … [...]
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