Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III:

...In her answer she avoids what she regards as the two main errors, reductionism and idealism...

...Nevertheless she has shed considerable light on the human origins of belief in such a world, and she has contributed magnificently to our understanding of the origins of the human mind the origins of the human mind...

...It is also true in any adequate investigation of spiritual matters...

...An investigation of this contribution can help those who hold such beliefs not only in better understanding their own motivation as believers but also in distingishing what is true and what is false in those beliefs...

...The creation of spirits and of stories about spirits was further stimulated by the human sense that in affirming anything, the mind affirms itself and confirms its own strength...

...And it is Langer's contention that such a concept is not merely another metaphysician's abstraction, which allegedly explains everything but which has for that very reason no relevance to scientific research...

...When a stance of detached observer and acquirer of book-knowledge is combined with a scientific imperialism which refuses to acknowledge the limits of science, a truncated view of reality is inevitable...

...The latter two responses, in spite of their limitations, can bring some useful results, but the limitations should be acknowledged, especially in investigating activities and beliefs concerning spirits...

...On the contrary the concept will be applicable in detailed scientific investigations...

...Langer insists that of course we cannot live after the body dies, and she notes that human beings have been slow in facing this fact with the heroic honesty which is appropriate...

...But her perspective is one which is shared by most of the contemporary scientific community and, indeed, by the academic community generally, including even some Christian theologians, so I do not single her out for criticism...

...This is true, I believe, in a genuinely humanistic psychology, where personal involvement in psychotherapy is at least as important as observations and book-learning...

...The trilogy will be tested, she envisages, by investigators in the various human disciplines on which it draws, especially the life-sciences...

...Indeed for Langer it is amazing that "human beings who are intelligent enough to carry on the practical affairs of life can possibly imagine such absurdities and assert them as facts," for beliefs concerning a spirit-world are not only obviously false (since there is no such world) but also limit-lessly varied, bizarre, and fantastic...

...An academic method of inquiry into human activities and beliefs often needs to be complemented by a method of personal involvement which brings firsthand personal experience of whatever is being investigated...

...And, unlike Langer and other modern minds, they mistakenly projected an agency behind the events even when none was apparent...

...Such awesome scholarship, painstakingly focused in a passionate intellectual quest over a period of many decades, is itself an illustrious example of the "natural wonder" which she is so deeply concerned to understand...

...They can be complemented by a genuinely open academic method which is not constricted by scientific method or scientific dogma in its study of testimonial material, especially when this comes from persons who are highly intelligent, very sophisticated, and cautiously self-critical...

...The anomaly cries out for explanation Langer responds by offering a complex set of interrelated accounts of what happened as mind first emerged...

...And the inadequacy is compounded if an academic approach assumes that such-and-such beliefs are false because they cannot be supported scientifically even though there is an abundance of prima facie experiential evidence in their favor...

...Either they refuse to consider it at all, or they explain it by hypotheses which are compatible with what contemporary science can regard as possible (no unconscious, no spirits), or they investigate whatever publicly observable claims are included in the testimony...

...In human consciousness this is felt as a partial individuation of the mind, which seems distinct from the rest of the organism, and which indeed seems to own -the rest of the organism...

...This step forward in human consciousness, along with the rise and dominance of modern science and the gradual improvement in our moral perspectives, provide her with some hope concerning human progress...

...Personal explorations of the spirit-world are then at least as important as sceptical scientific investigations of beliefs concerning that world...

...Only relatively recently in human history have many of us acquired a realistic tragic vision of ourselves as mortal...

...In such investigations there is no substitute for direct personal experiences similar to those which have given rise to these activites and beliefs among human beings past and present...

...An open academic approach need not assume that any such reflective testimony is true...

...They were "safety-valves" as they produced symbols to deal indirectly with feelings and insights which were intellectually too advanced or emotionally too disturbing to be understood in clearly literal terms, especially the finality of death...

...This tendency began with the projection of our uniquely-human bodily feelings of balance and imbalance into physical objects as well as plants and animals...

...It is much closer to reductionism, for she looks to biological concepts to explain mind, though these concepts involve a revised and enlarged conception of biology...

...Volume III, which I have been asked to review despite my relative incompetence to appraise it in the scientific way which Langer sees as most appropriate, deals mainly with the origins of human belief in a spirit-world and with the more recent and reluctant human acknowledgement of the finality of death...

...So it seems as if I, the mind, could survive bodily death, and such survival may be deeply desired and the death of the "I" may be secretly dreaded...

...Thus it fails the most basic testing procedure in contemporary science, which regards such evidence as merely "testimonial...

...The concepts which she proposes are drawn from reflection concerning human feeling, which has a biological foundation Human beings, like other animals, respond to their environment, but their feeling-response is expressed in symbolism, which is a way of understanding whatever is experienced in nature as having a lifelike form...

...Such rituals, with their accompanying beliefs in spirits, have been virtually universal until recent times, and they have been practiced in a vast variety of forms...

...Indeed, I find her kind of explanation helpful in my own attempts to distinguish between genuine experiential discernment and imaginative projection as I critically appraise my own specific convictions in these areas...

...Indeed, their testimony may be corroborated by others who involve themselves in psychotherapy or meditation...

...However much I respect the academic method I am convinced that it is inadequate in exploring most human activities and human beliefs, especially in spiritual matters...

...This distinctive human way of understanding is specially prominent in art, but it can be re-incorporated into science, especially biological science, so as to enable mind to explain its own emergence from non-mind...

...My disagreement with Langer in convictions concerning spirits is linked with a disagreement concerning the place of scientific method - and, more broadly, "academic" method - in the investigation of reality...

...In addition, the stories had a function similar to that of dreams...

...Suzanne Langer's investigation of the spirit-world is not sufficiently open...

...Thus anything one could imagine served as a statement, and story-tellers were admired for their fecund, unhampered imaginative powers, with no concern about objective content...

...Scientists, however, cannot regard this converging testimony as evidence if they remain faithful to the strict tenets of their own method...

...In this review, however I shall consider only the spirit-world and mortality...

...Idealism postulates "spiritual" causes which allegedly have been operative in the world both before and after the emergence of human mind, and thus mistakenly animates nature with human-like agency...

...But there is a third alternative to the method of science and the method of personal involvement...

...Detached observation and reflection, plus scholarly survey and synthesis of other investigators' observations and reflections, is not enough...

...As for human acknowledgment of death's finality, this has been reluctant because of the way in which we differ from animals in having a brain which achieves a partial individuation, a "matrix" of its own alongside its involvement with the larger matrix of the human being...

...A more broadly empirical approach is required, drawing on both methods of inquiry...

...Langer refuses to elevate a running brook into something which can speak to us like a book of poetry...

...To me it is obvious that there are spirits and that the human spirit can survive death and that what Langer calls "magic" is sometimes efficacious...

...Reductionism explains mind in biological concepts which ignore the vast gulf which divides human mentality from animal mentality and, even more, from elementary organic life...

...For Langer the spirit-world is entirely a human creation, a fantastic delusion...

...Thus I do not accept Langer's initial assumption that such convictions are obviously false, and I find her irritatingly condescending in her attitude towards people - most human beings in human history - who have held such convictions...

...It need only be open to the possibility...

...Her explanations are still relevant and illuminating, though incomplete...

...But if she is mistaken, and human discoveries of super-sensible realities are actually mixed in with imaginative projections, the investigation becomes much more complex than she envisages...

...Yet someone who has undergone deep psychotherapy may have experiences which are convincing concerning the reality of the unconscious, and someone who learns how to meditate in ways which allegedly provide access to spiritual realities may have convincing experiences of those realities...

...And some Western spiritualists discriminate subtly but clearly between genuine spirits and "thought-forms" which seem to be spirits, or between genuine spirit-possession and multiple personality...

...Anyone interested in any of these topics should read volume III, for her explanations are, at the very least, very stimulating and plausible hypotheses, and her mustering of evidence is very impressive...

...Her own proposal, however, is not a compromise midway between reductionism and idealism...

...My basis for belief is my own personal experience in investigating these matters...

...She also considers the origins of monotheism, morality, punishment, sacrifice, cities, mathematics, and science...

...Langer refuses to reduce poetry to merely an organic reaction favored by natural selection...

...Moreover, the early-human capacity for symbolizing not only was applied to external objects and events but also was exercised on its own as an imaginative power to conceive an unlimited range of possible entities and agencies, thus mind created a spirit-multitude not only indwelling the objects of nature which are observed through our physical sense-organs but also inhabiting hidden realms beyond the range of sensation...

...But what if the beliefs are essentially true...

...The method of personal involvement provides evidence which cannot all be corroborated by a detached observer, for such an observer is, by definition, not involved...

...Such projection expanded into a projection of all the physical tensions which we feel, so that eventually human beings tended to see many other human feelings expressed in the shapes and movements of non-human entities, and with feelings, to see agency...

...And magic also emerged from the unquestioned conviction that intense mental activity such as blessing and cursing must have some effects in the external world...

...For example, some Tibetan Buddhists are acutely aware of the creative projection at work in the "gods" which they encounter during meditation...

...Langer's trilogy draws on such a vast variety of intellectual resources that it is difficult to think of anyone who could be an appropriate reviewer...

...If her proposals facilitate further scientific research, particularly by fostering cross-fertilization between disciplines, her Herculean labors will be rewarded...

...How can we explain the emergence of mind in the natural history of life on earth...

...Given such a concept, which goes beyond a mechanistic billiard-ball notion of causality, but which does not involve a pre-scientific projection of human-like agency on to nature, the emergence of mind can be understood as a natural outcome of prehuman history...

...Finally, Langer sees magic as a delusion emerging as an attempt by the human mind to control the fantastic spirit-products of its own creative imagination which otherwise might threaten to take over human-life...

...Langer presents her explanations of belief in a spirit-multitude and of belief in life after death on the assumption that the beliefs are false, indeed obviously false and very irrational...

...In a similar way Freud's psychoanalytic account of the origins of what he regarded as the false and irrational belief in God is still relevant and illuminating, though incomplete, if God exists...

...Both Langer and Freud help us to understand the vast and conflicting variety of beliefs throughout human history, for the human mind has contributed much to the content of the beliefs in question even if they are essentially true...

...A key concept proposed by Langer in a revised biology is "act," which she defines as, "a special sort of natural event arising from a matrix of similarly patterned events, and so organically involved in that matrix that all influences which can affect a particular act must do so by affecting the matrix, or organism, as a whole...

...From the beginning human beings have tended to see every event "in the guise of an act instead of an instance of a simpler, non-biological mechanics" such as has become common since the rise of modern science...

...Academic method & human reality MIND AN ESSAY ON HUMAN FEELING, VOL III Susanne K. Lunger Johns Hopkins, $20, 231 pp Donald Evans FOR Susanne K. Langer the human mind is the greatest of all natural wonders...

...Is there any other brilliant philosopher today who is also as learned in virtually all the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities...

...Yet the rituals have no evident survival value in relation to the material interests of humankind...

...How can we explain the evolutionary origin of rituals focused on a multitude of spirits: gods and goddesses, devils and angels, souls of dead people and animals, plus spirits inhabiting not only persons but also animals and trees and brooks...

...This is the theme-question of her monumental trilogy, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling...