Politics of the "soul": Sommer excerpt #4

And here we need to stress one absolutely crucial dimension of our story, which both Skeptics and historians of parapsychology have almost consistently ignored: the rather explosive significance of the ‘soul’ as a political object, and heated debates over its nature which more than just shaped the very curricula of modern sciences.

Most fundamentally and consistently, this played into the rather justified concern over the unholy alliance of altar and throne. A central argument by both religious and areligious critics of Catholicism not just since the Reformation was that the Church, supported by monarchs and aristocrats appointed by the Pope, consciously exploited human fears of hell for the purpose of maintaining absolute power. Such fears, it has been alleged throughout the centuries, were kept alive by stories of demonic possession, poltergeist infestations and ghostly visions of souls of the damned, and the assurance that relief could only come from Catholic priests performing exorcisms and reading masses.

And here we begin to understand the prominent place of attacks on ‘paranormal’ belief in Hobbes’s aforementioned political treatise Leviathan, first published in 1651. A much more prominent move to deny the existence of spiritual beings apart from God, as in the examples of Hobbes, Newton (who, however, still believed in angels) and Priestley, was to deny not the existence of spirits, but merely the possibility of their manifestation in the physical world. This view was consistent with mainstream Protestantism and (officially) held by major Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke, Leibniz, and to some degree, Kant. Also in the eighteenth century, it was properly atheistic materialists predominantly in France, including Diderot and La Mettrie, who fought alongside Deists like Voltaire to wage a war on any form of ‘paranormal’ belief, with the declared political goal to end talk of souls, hell, and devils once and for all.

It was these fierce debates over souls, prophecies, visions and ‘magic’ which also lay at the root of wars of religion, riots and bloody revolts, such as Cromwell’s overthrow of the monarchy in England before the restoration of the throne (and foundation of the Royal Society) in 1660, and the French Revolution in the 1780s and 90s in particular. Unsurprisingly, these never-ending religio-political upheavals were prominent topics in the correspondence and often at least alluded to in published writings of virtually every Enlightenment intellectual. And as Charcot’s appropriation of hypnosis for overtly secularizing purposes during renewed anti-Catholic revolts in Third Republic France indicates, this ‘Enlightenment crusade’ (to use Roy Porter’s term) continued until far into the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Perhaps the most relevant cultural transformation following similar events, however, occurred in Germany – a major cradle of modern experimental university sciences.

When debates over materialism divided German scientific and medical communities after a group of political radical physiologists declared that “Thoughts stand in about the same relationship to the brain as bile to the liver and urine to the kidneys”, these self-styled ‘scientific materialists’ were attacked not just by religious scientists. Among their most vocal critics in Germany were the famous physicist Herman Helmholtz and his friend, the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond. These men, who would become two of the most influential scientists and science popularizers internationally, were themselves deeply anti-clerical. And their critiques of the ‘scientific materialists’ notwithstanding, they certainly also contributed to modern notions of materialism being the default worldview of science.

Ernst Brücke

Throughout their long careers, both men worked relentlessly to implant a methodological reductionism in the fledgling life-sciences in Germany and beyond. This had been their professed goal since their student days, when they formed a circle of friends including other now famous physiologists, Ernst Brücke (Sigmund Freud’s teacher) and Carl Ludwig. Together, as put by du Bois-Reymond in a letter in 1842, these young men “conspired to assert the truth that there are no forces at work in the organism other than the common physical-chemical ones”.

Again, it would be writing history backwards if we simply assumed that this ‘truth’ was already scientifically established in 1842 (the beginning, by the way, of one of several political German revolutions against the Church). In fact, it’s not particularly controversial to state that the jury is still out even from the perspective of today’s mainstream biophysics. On the contrary, the reference to “common physical-chemical” forces already implies that ‘animal magnetism’ and related notions of a vitalistic ‘life force’ were to be categorically excluded from the men’s empiricism, which they indeed dismissed without any investigation whatsoever. Interestingly, this was demonstrably not the case in British elite physics, where such concepts – along with parapsychological phenomena, which Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond also categorically rejected – continued to be seriously considered at least until the early 1900s.

Still, and contra the ‘scientific materialists’, Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond absolutely refused to claim that science had solved the mystery of the relationship of mind and brain. Instead, and despite their own life-long anti-Catholic political commitments, they actively popularized a programmatic agnosticism: Science, they argued, never has and never will be able to say anything definite about the ultimate nature of the mind. This agnosticism was famously expressed in one of the most influential mottos of German science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which would also stake the permitted limits of scientific enquiry for decades to come: du Bois-Reymond’s verdict ignoramus et ignorabimus (Latin for “we do not know, and we will not know”).

Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond were friends with prominent scientists in Britain including Thomas H. Huxley and the physicist John Tyndall, who pursued the same secularizing goals as their German allies: to transform the sciences from an activity of leisurely, wealthy gentlemen to stable, paid professions protected from theological influence and censorship. We already noted Huxley’s critique of Hume, and his dislike of the new word ‘scientist’. As for neologisms, Huxley himself was the inventor of an important modern word which I just used: agnosticism. Huxley had originally coined the term in 1869, not so much to profess ignorance regarding the nature of mind-brain relationships, but of the existence of God. And unlike his German friends, Huxley famously did argue for the complete dependence of the mind on the brain.

Still, as philosophers are well aware, mind-brain epiphenomenalism is not the same as ontological materialism: Assuming matter, including the brain, turns out to be completely reducible to a mental substance or process, it does not necessarily follow that our individual minds persist after the brain dies. Despite his epiphenomenalism, Huxley was therefore still a vocal critic of ontological materialism, and while Huxley and Tyndall have often been called ‘materialists’, they both in fact subscribed to metaphysical positions much more closely akin to ‘pantheism’ – the belief in nature’s all-pervadedness by an impersonal divine spirit or force.

But as far as spiritualism and paranormal phenomena were concerned, Huxley, Tyndall and other members of the growing network of popularizers of ‘scientific naturalism’ were just as programmatically hostile as their German allies Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond. To illustrate this, let’s briefly return to Huxley’s critique of Hume’s assertion that even well-substantiated reports of ‘paranormal’ phenomena should be dismissed because the claimed effects would constitute transgressions of natural law (which, as you may have noted, closely resembles Faraday’s later claim concerning the impossibility of levitating tables). In reply, Huxley wrote:

If a piece of lead were to remain suspended of itself, in the air, the occurrence would be a “miracle”, in the sense of a wonderful event, indeed; but no one trained in the methods of science would imagine that any law of nature was really violated thereby. He would simply set to work to investigate the conditions under which so highly unexpected an occurrence took place; and thereby enlarge his experience and modify his, hitherto, unduly narrow conception of the laws of nature.

In practice, however, things looked a little different. When Huxley’s friend Alfred Russel Wallace invited him in 1869 to join a committee for the scientific investigation of reported marvels of spiritualism, which quite frequently involved levitating objects, Huxley replied: “Supposing the phenomena to be genuine – they do not interest me”. Still, both Huxley and Tyndall did occasionally attend seances. But as the unveiled sarcasm especially in Huxley’s private correspondence, and the bitingly polemical tone of both men’s ‘reports’ (published in popular papers) indicates, they did so with the evident goal to debunk rather than seriously investigate mediums.

Besides the ‘other Darwin’, A. R. Wallace, additional eminent scientific friends of Tyndall and Huxley came out in favor of the reality of spiritualist phenomena. The most prominent among those apart from Wallace was William Crookes, the discoverer of the element thallium and a pioneer in the study of radioactivity. Another eminent British parapsychological investigator was a former assistant and co-worker of Tyndall’s, physicist William Barrett. After failed attempts to mobilize scientific interest in parapsychological investigations through lectures to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and elsewhere, in 1882 Barrett became one of the founders of the aforementioned Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

When he was appointed president of the SPR in 1904, Barrett mentioned in his presidential address a meeting with Hermann Helmholtz during a visit in Britain in the late 1800s. When the conversation turned to the topic of telepathy, Barrett claimed, Helmholtz told him that neither “the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses”, would make him “believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation”, as this was “clearly impossible”.

We should be weary to accept Barrett’s verbatim quote from a decades-old conversation as a historical document. But his characterization of Helmholtz as an influential critic of the paranormal who was absolutely uninterested in empirical evidence is certainly consistent not just with Helmholtz’s goal to liberate science from theological tyranny through the professionalization and polarization of ‘naturalistic’ science, but expressed in statements Helmholtz made first-hand, for example in his correspondence with du Bois-Reymond. It’s also no coincidence that Helmholtz was one of the main proponents of a physical law which is still cited by Skeptics as a supposed knock-down proof of the physical impossibility of any paranormal phenomenon: the principle of the conversation of energy. Helmholtz himself explicitly stated that his formulation of the law – which was immediately translated into English by Tyndall – had been motivated by his intent to demonstrate the implausibility of the concept of the sou and vitalist notions of a life-force.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.