Keith Ward - More Than Matter?: Is There More to Life than Molecules?

Gilbert Ryle was an important twentieth-century British philosopher who is famous for attacking what he called the myth of Cartesian dualism, the myth of the ghost in the machine. This is the myth that minds are different from and more than matter. But was Ryle right? And does his attack also undermine (without meaning to) belief in the unique dignity and value of human persons, which is centred on the nature of their inner experiences and responsible actions? Those are the central questions of this book.

Once upon a time, when I was studying philosophy at Oxford, my supervisor was Gilbert Ryle. He was one of Britains outstanding philosophers in the 1950s and 60s, and I was one of his last pupils. He was also my moral tutor, though he said, I do not know what a moral tutor is, and I hope I never have to find out. And, as far as I know, he never did.

Although not as well known as Wittgenstein these days, Ryle was extremely influential and was a kind of Oxford equivalent of Wittgenstein, holding views about philosophy that were very similar to those of the Cambridge philosopher. In a sense, this is a book about Wittgenstein as much as it is about Ryle except that people get so emotional about different interpretations of Wittgensteins gnomic philosophy that I have thought it better only to make rather muted claims in that area. When I was teaching philosophy in Cambridge, Professor Anscombe, who translated and edited Wittgensteins later work and often discussed it with me, terrified me so much that I have decided that it is safer to leave discussion of Wittgenstein to acknowledged experts like the Oxford philosopher P. M. Hacker. Nevertheless, I believe that much of what I say about Ryle would apply to Wittgenstein, or at least to many popular interpretations of Wittgenstein, as well.

It is worth talking about Ryle because he was a very good and significant twentieth-century philosopher, and because he wrote the classic critique of Descartes dualism (usually called Cartesian dualism), the view that the mind and the body are two distinct substances. Ryle originated the expression the ghost in the machine to describe Descartes view, implying that the mind is a ghost (an illusion, really) wandering in the machine of the body. I strongly object to this description, though it has been very influential, and want to try to rehabilitate Descartes, at least to some extent. I want to suggest that mind and consciousness are different from, something over and above, molecules and matter, and that they are not at all ghostly. And I will argue that having such a belief is important if you put a great value on individual human experience and responsible moral action.

Ryle is particularly interesting because he rejected dualism, but he was still a humanist. He thought that you could defend human uniqueness, freedom, and responsibility without having a belief that minds are something more than matter. I do not think this is true, but examining Ryles arguments is a good way of finding out what you really think about this issue. In fact, it will take me some time to get around to considering Ryle in detail, as there are problems that have to be cleared up first about the nature of philosophy and about differing philosophical views of the nature of reality. I will use the word metaphysics to mean a general view about what kinds of things are real (whether, for instance, there are minds in addition to bodies, and whether everything is determined by laws of nature or whether the will is free). Ryle had one such philosophical view, but, oddly enough, he did not think that he had.