By Sam HarrisSimon & Schuster, 2014
Near the beginning of Western Civilization, in Classical Athens, a quarrel broke out in the high ranks of society, one which split son from father and brother from brother. This was not uncommon—the Athenians, though not as committed to martial exercise as their Spartan neighbors, made up for it with a certain bitchy litigiousness that had the magistrates busier than those in Beverly Hills divorce courts. This new fight was about more than the usual push for power: the Athenians seemed to know that the very fabric of their culture was at stake.On one side stood both the priests and the poets. This may strike us as a strange combination now, but there was then little difference between the two. Indeed, the poet Hesiod provided the Greeks with their images and popular understanding of the gods. It’s true that the priests were the actual practitioners—they communed with the gods and brought back their obscure mysteries. But the poets presented rich and compelling portraits of what life under the decrees of the gods might entail—for the darker side of all this, think Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.On the other side of this quarrel stood a strange new breed called philosophers, literally “lovers of wisdom.” Beginning with Thales and continuing through a number of distinguished men, a human type developed for whom the dictates of the priests and poets were not satisfactory. They sought out knowledge, as opposed to mere law or convention, handed down from mysterious origins by a tight-lipped, authoritarian priesthood. The greatest and most famous of these philosophers, one whose inquiries we still grapple with today, was Socrates.Socrates spent much of his later life in the company of young aristocrats, asking uncomfortable questions of the Athenian establishment. The subjects ranged from sexual mores to the value and definition of piety, and so on, until the implication was clear: Socrates sought to embarrass and refute the gods, or at least the men who stood for them. This upset not only priests and the poets (Aristophanes’ The Clouds portrays Socrates as a peddler of phony wisdom, tricking the impressionable young), but also the political establishment, who saw religion as necessary force in maintaining law and order. In short, they executed Socrates for impiety and corrupting the young.But the quarrel he exemplified—between reason and revelation—lived on through the centuries, from the 17th century cherem, or excommunication by Jewish authorities, of Dutch rationalist philosopher Spinoza, to the famous Scopes trial, in which the state of Tennessee accused a schoolteacher of spreading the impious theory of human evolution. The most recent incarnation of this battle took place over the course of the last decade, the defenders of reason going under the banner of the New Atheists.Spearheaded by a group of intellectuals—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, collectively known as the Four Horsemen— the New Atheists took on the most notorious aspects of religious custom, from the Christian Right's attempt to teach creationism in public schools to the Vatican's prohibition of contraceptives to the outrageous attacks on civil society perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists. These writers waged an all-out war on religion in defense of secularism and the modern values of free speech and individual autonomy.But the Horsemen and their ilk overreached themselves when they attempted to address the root of religious belief. They claimed that not only are the actions of the religious over the centuries reprehensible (a fine claim, though made unstable by even a cursory glance at the history of warfare and tyranny without a particularly religious motivation) but that religious belief itself is foolish and, more often, dangerous. The core flaw of the New Atheists is their understanding of the quarrel as not between revelation and reason, but as between religion and science, meaning specifically modern physics and evolutionary theory. Despite its familiarity, the equation of reason and science is not uncontested. From Plato naming the philosopher Heraclitus one of “Homer’s Army” to Hegel’s critique of phrenology and physiognomy, there is a long tradition of recognizing the products of rationality as a font of belief capable of orthodoxy as much as any theism. In ignorance of this side of the debate, the latest releases of the New Atheists take on the character not of reasoned arguments for secular, Enlightenment values, but rather of yet another “lifestyle” attempting to replace religion, not refute it.Cue Sam Harris’ new book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Far from a delicate and profound meditation on the possibility of a meaningful life despite the absence of a deity, of which there are many in the philosophical tradition, Harris’ book has the distinctly irrational tone of an author who already has all the answers, and is only to pleased to share them with an eager audience. For him, it seems, the millennia-long struggle to decide whether reason or religion is correct is over, and atheism has won. What he has now set himself to is determining the ways in which we will live in a post-religious era.Harris’ answer to this pressing question is a mixture of neuropsychology, in which he has a doctorate, and Eastern-inspired meditation. A bizarre, if not completely unfamiliar mixture, the claim is roughly that there is an identifiable neural process one undergoes in what is referred to as a “spiritual experience,” but that the significance of this is not rationally, that is, scientifically, accessible. The main claim of the book is that there is no “self,” but rather a moment-to-moment experience of presence, the true meaning of spirituality is to be in communion with. “Consciousness,” he writes, “is simply the light by which the contours of our mind and body are known.” One wishes that he would, in making this claim, distinguish between consciousness and the mind, but he rather only does so between consciousness and the brain. Indeed, he denies there is a difference between the brain and the mind. He writes, “We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains.” Well, yes and no. Of course, without the grey matter floating around upstairs there would be very little of this chatting and theorizing. But that is not to say that by understanding the mechanisms of the brain we understand what it is for a human being to know, to feel, to be. Indeed, Harris spends a great deal of the book exploring the most popular ways in which scientists and scientifically-minded philosophers have dealt with the question and come up largely empty handed.The prescription he makes for dealing with this apparent dilemma is to turn to the East, and seek out this wisdom of meditation and such activities as yoga. Following impressively concise and fluent descriptions of rather complex neurology and contemporary analytic philosophy, Harris provides several guides for such practices, as well as a tour of the Western experience dabbling in them. This is, independent of Harris’ purposes, a fascinating topic, and since the crisis of confidence the West has experienced in the wake of the 20th century, there have been many prominent and clear-sighted people who have looked to India, China, the Middle East, and elsewhere for answers. There is, despite the excesses of the campus with which we are all familiar, a real exploration to be undertaken here.Unfortunately, Harris makes his case in the most clichéd and philosophically uninteresting manner possible. He begins by taking a stroll down memory lane, recounting an unsuccessful attempt at self-examination atop a mountain in Colorado as a part of that most middle-class American experience, a wilderness program. There is, of course, nothing wrong with sending a child out with some experienced guides and letting him or her get a taste of the beauty and power of nature. But, as Saint Paul tells us, when one becomes a man one must put childish things away. Harris must have missed this advice, since he continues in his first chapter, titled simply “Spirituality,” to tell of his experience at the age of 20 taking MDMA, or ecstasy, with his best friend and realizing that he loved him.
The conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside of me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
While appreciative of the reminder of what the word ‘envy’ means, I cannot help but think Harris has missed a fundamental and widely-known part of the drug experience. Wonderful though the kind of openness available via narcotics may be, the real human task of sobering up and attempting to rid oneself of envy in daily life is what allows for personal growth. Anyone can sit on a couch and think nice thoughts about a friend’s superlatives, but what if because of those admirable qualities he beats you out on a job that you desperately need? I suspect a tinge of envy, perhaps even resentment, might creep in. And, what is worse, Harris seems to contradict himself by invoking more than a hint of Judeo-Christian morality. Give no thought for the morrow, have only compassion for others, etc. etc. As Harris’ old comrade Hitchens would have put it, a bit of envy is a necessary motivator for innovation and improvement. One gets better because one sees that another already is. The “love drug” might feel good, but it will get you exactly nowhere and, taken under the wrong conditions, will stop your heart and leave you bloodless on a dance floor.These problems notwithstanding, it feels a bit silly, a bit hippy-ish to be even discussing the merits of a drug-induced experience in the context of determining the best means of exploring the possibility spirituality. Indeed, this doesn’t even approach dorm-room philosophizing. To repeat, the central contention of the book, toward which this admittedly charming vignette is advanced, is as follows:
The feeling we call ‘I’ is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished.
The image of the Minotaur is, as always, a fascinating one. The Greek myth of a bull-monster who absconds with the Cretan king’s daughter and hides her in the middle of the labyrinth, only to be defeated by the hero Theseus deftly performs the subtle task of illustrating the popular conception of the self or soul. Unfortunately, Harris’ scorn for the idea obstructs a proper understanding of it, and he instead places it as the object of ridicule.Another book that employs the image is Plato’s Phaedo, which is concerned, among other things, with the possibility of a core of being—a soul and its potential immortality. In the difficult and subtle argumentation characteristic of Platonic dialogues, Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul without rejecting the presence or importance of the temporal world of lived experience. It is precisely their coexistence that allows for philosophical exploration. The classicist Seth Benardete referred to this intermingling of the permanent and the contingent as an “indeterminate dyad.” It is a complex idea, one which certainly banishes the popular conception of the self as oversimplified. But what it does not do is baldly assert its own view and employ a variety of irrelevant straw men to “support” its claim. Harris would have done well, in the composition of Waking Up, to consult this ancient yet perennial text and the 2000+ years of commentary on the vital question he claims to address.Instead, he takes the fashionable route of mixing the rigidly precise, if thematically narrow, empirical neuroscience with the wishy-washy warbling of new age spiritualism. Much like his ignorance of Plato on the topic of the soul, Harris seems unaware of almost the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition. Either this or he silently rejects it. “Few scientists and philosophers,” he writes, “have developed strong skills of introspection.” Reading this line is perhaps the kind of feeling of transcendence Harris is advocating. I felt, briefly, as though I had left my body, the delicate balance that allows life temporarily thrown off by such a marvelously stupid sentence. I have reservations about the state of academic philosophy, but surely most programs must still assign books of philosophy to at least their freshmen. It has been some time since college, I suppose, and Descartes doesn’t stick for everyone. And so, for the ostensibly greener pastures of neurology and Eastern-inspired good vibes, Harris abandons the extraordinary efforts of philosophy, which, perhaps most ironically, are the foundations for his own understanding of science and religion.He claims this book to be a “philosophical unraveling,” of consciousness, of “the feeling of self we call, ‘I.’” The simple fact is that it is not. There is no fixed way of doing philosophy, or looking into things philosophically, but it seems that the rule one must follow is that no assumption goes unaccounted for. Harris, for all of his insistence on the primacy of reason, does very little reasoning. Instead, he simply--and implicitly--equates that queen of the faculties with the cold calculations of natural science.In his landmark text, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that the biological and physiological sciences can do nothing to illuminate the question of consciousness, and that such a task must remain in the treacherous but nevertheless necessary realm of philosophical investigation. Harris is welcome, as is anyone interested in the question, to disagree, and make the opposing case. But Harris does no such thing. He simply assumes that neurology is the key to understanding the mind (as opposed to simply the brain.) In response to the chasm opened up following the removal of the human from the understanding of nature, imports unfamiliar (or are they cliche, by now?) and ill-defined practices of zoning out, insisting that any resistance one has to this white noise is simply the bad habits of the self dying hard. But, once again, he does not argue for this. Despite whatever he may say to the contrary, the ideal reader of this book is not one who has given up faith, but is rather on the hunt for a new one.Harris’ bankrupt conception of rationality is what prevents Waking Up from rising above the fray of frivolous self-help books. That the author holds a PhD. in neuroscience, and that the current fashion is to equate such science with genuine philosophical exploration of consciousness, does nothing to temper the ultimately self-gratified tone of the book. If Dr. Harris believed that the question of consciousness is a serious one, and not simply a matter of making oneself feel better in world left cold by science, he would attend to it with the intellectual rigor he praises elsewhere. I do not doubt that he is able to open his eyes to this problem. What I question is whether he would prefer to keep them shut.____Jack Hanson's previous reviews & poetry for Open Letters can be found here.
