Here is an extract from the intro to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg by Steven Tester.
GCL was a thoroughly modern mind in so many ways making writers such as Dennett, Grayling and the like seem rather timid (my previous Lichtenberg posts).
Given Lichtenberg’s interest in self-knowledge, metempsychosis, and personal identity, it is not surprising that he often reflects on the mysteries of mind-body dualism (J 1306). In the Waste Books, he primarily considers two of the dominant views of the period: psychophysical parallelism and physical influx. Through the legacy of Leibniz and the continuation of Leibnizian philosophy in the work of the preeminent German rationalist Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the thesis of psychophysical parallelism came to dominate much of the discussion of dualism in Germany. According to this thesis, there is no causal physical interaction between mind and body; instead, they mirror one another in a pre-established harmony. Physical influx, on the other hand, held that there was some direct causal link between mental and physical phenomena. Lichtenberg finds ample occasion to parody both views and dualism in general. He suggests for example that the soul must have a very detailed map of the body to which it is purportedly related or that one might create a fairytale to describe their interaction. He also questions how a simple soul could be related to a complex physical body or brain and why only a single soul should be related to a single body (F 349, F 189). He even jokingly imagines a machine that would model the behavior of the competing views—perhaps only then would we have grounds for deciding which is best. Because of such problems with dualism, he also considers various alternatives throughout the Waste Books. On a trip to England between 1774 and 1775, Lichtenberg became familiar with materialist theories such as those of David Hartley (1705–1757) and the associationist psychologist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). In his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), Hartley argued that all psychological events, perceptions, sensations, and emotions could be explained by material, physical processes, and Priestley furthered these claims in Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775). Inspired by these ideas, Lichtenberg often offers causal explanations of psychological phenomena in terms of how sensations of external objects are transmitted to the retina through nerve fluids in the eye (F 349, F 1084). He also finds inspiration for his own view in the work of the French materialists, Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), whose De l’Esprit (On Mind) (1758) argues for a materialist and determinist view of man, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), whose L’Homme Machine (Machine Man) (1748) famously rejected Cartesian mind-body dualism. At one point, he predicts that psychology itself will eventually arrive at a subtle materialism, but he also considers some potential arguments against materialism (F 425). He is also acutely aware of what he calls the “tremendous parallax” between our conception of ourselves in terms of materialism and the conception of ourselves gained through introspection. Beginning from introspection, we cannot seem to get at the physical processes that might underlie our thinking, and beginning from the point of view of a physical world, it seems difficult to account for the variety of our thoughts. Moreover, he finds materialism problematic because it implies that human actions are determined by physical processes and that free will is merely an illusion (J 668, E 30). In the philosophy of Spinoza, Lichtenberg discovers another possible alternative to dualism and often proposes that mind and body may in fact be aspects of a single substance or substrate, whether God or nature. Lichtenberg also raises the question of the relationship between mind and body in his writings on physiognomy. Eighteenth-century physiognomists claimed that the character or soul of a person was mirrored in their physical features, particularly the face, so that intelligence, for example, could be inferred from features such as the distance between a person’s eyes or the shape of her head. Physiognomy was taken very seriously by its scholarly adherents; but it also became a wildly popular theory, and in parlors throughout Germany people traced silhouettes of one another in hopes of discerning the deeper characteristics of their souls. In his essay “Über Physiognomik wider die Physiognomen” (“On Physiognomy, against the Physiognomists”) (1777), Lichtenberg attacks this view and its foremost proponent, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801). And in a later essay, “Fragment von Schwänzen” (“Fragment on Tails”) (1783), he lampoons Lavater by analyzing the silhouettes of various animal and wig tails in order to draw ridiculous conclusions about the soul of the individuals. Similar remarks are found throughout the Waste Books. Against the physiognomists, Lichtenberg argues that we may infer things about the character of a person only on the basis of her acquired features. Thus someone who smiles frequently might have wrinkles around the mouth, and someone who furrows her brow might have distinct wrinkles on the forehead. From this it might legitimately be concluded that the former is often happy and the latter often troubled. Contrary to what the physiognomists had claimed, there is, however, no intrinsic or innate relationship between characteristics such as intelligence and physical features. It is clear also that Lichtenberg would have rejected on this basis the burgeoning anthropological studies that sought to infer the mental characteristics of a race from the physical features of its members. Not only did he find physiognomy epistemically suspect, but he thought it may also lead to a dangerous “physiognomical auto de fe,” a trial by fire in which people would be judged according to physical features for crimes they have not yet committed (F 521). What sets Lichtenberg’s thinking apart on these issues of mind and body is, however, the way he often entertains various points of view, seeking to understand the origin and implications of the philosophical problems. He diagnoses dualism, for example, as a carryover from our unreflective youth, suggesting that we often employ terms such as soul, and perhaps even matter, without a clear understanding of their meaning (J 668, E 30). Or he suggests that we employ such terms in philosophical discussions as the algebraist might insert a variable into an equation as a stand-in for some unknown quantity. The unreflective or vague use of these terms often leads us into philosophical discussions without any clear understanding of what these discussions are about. In such situations, Lichtenberg proposes that we attend to our use of such terms, the hidden theoretical commitments embedded in them, and the consequences these hypotheses or “pictures” of the world have for our actions and will have for further investigations (J 568).
manwithoutqualities 