Darwin initiated a rhetorical strategy of minimizing the difference between species — or what is the same thing, of maximizing the difficulties of delineating one species from another. He made the species concept suspect, although he continued to use it where it suited him. The implication was that larger taxonomic categories were also suspect, and the difference between amoeba and man was one of degree rather than kind.
One result was that the mind, with its long history of philosophical reflection, was reduced to mere matter. Material complexity replaced the non-materiality of mind. The mind descended into mindlessness.
In an age of vigorous philosophy, such mindlessness would have been exposed immediately. However, it was an age of science and the philosophers had to bow. Indeed many of them were materialists, cheering from the sidelines.
In addition to weak philosophy, a weak Christianity bowed to the new mindlessness. Its institutions were weak, its leaders were weak, and many adherents were weak, too. Once the new mindlessness took a tenacious hold, it was too weak to mount much of a challenge. Christianity acquiesced to the authority of the scientist, the priesthood of materialism.
How could minds resort to such mindlessness as to ignore themselves? The air of objectivity seduced them. Without mind, there is no subjective mind to argue about. The ultimate hole-in-the-wall objectivity was achieved. This mental camera obscura filtered itself out except for a tiny subjective hole and then defended that hole tenaciously.
Is objectivity really the mind minimizing itself? Yes. Where there is mind, there is subjectivity because mind is attached to a subject. The idea that subjectivity could be harmonized with objectivity was excluded. The object was everything, the subject nothing.
What is the pinhole that shows no essential difference between amoeba and man? What invariant is permitted in the midst of an ever-changing world? It is the invariant of mindlessness, the mind that empties itself of itself. Sound like eastern religion? It is.
But in the West it goes back at least to Galileo and the early scientists. They divided experience into primary and secondary and promoted the primary as the more authentic. What is this primary experience? It is experience that can be measured – that is, objective experience. This they argued did not change from subject to subject.
But, as we certainly know now if we didn’t know then, primary experience does in fact change from subject to subject. It depends on the position and velocity of the observer. It depends on the calibration of the measuring device. It depends on the mind ignoring a thousand things in order to focus on a few things, as if it has certain knowledge of what is significant and what is not.
2008