Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003

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Catalano, Joseph S. Thinking Matter. New York, Routledge, 2000. 224 pages including bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-415-92665-3

Reviewed by

Javier Pulido Biosca

From the title to the appendixes, Professor Catalano’s book is intelligent and controversial. It sustains arguments that break with some commonplaces in the philosophy of the last fifty years. Beginning the introduction, the author points out his realist and materialist perspective, and his anthropocentrism. In these positions he is arguing that nothing exists but the matter and that the link between the mind and the world is our fleshy body.

Catalano is opposing to reduce qualities to quantities. His anti–reductionism is very important along this ambitious book. The author support a non–reductionist materialism and criticises the operation that most of contemporary materialists do when they try to reduce qualities into quantities and, at the time, pretend to reduce the consciousness of qualities into quantitative relations. Catalano observe that this pretension is not coherent: “while scientific materialists deny the objective existence of qualities, such as sound, they are realists to the extent that they claim that causes for our hearing sound exist in the world” (p. 2). Catalano is continuing with the tradition initiated by Hegel, and passing by Husserl and Bergson leads to Sartre; he assumed that consciousness is a privileged experience that cannot be reduced into quantitative relations.

Traditionally, this non–reduccionist position could derive into a kind of idealism, and into a dualism, as the one of Plato or Descartes, that conceived a world of qualities and ideas separated from the quantitative material world. Catalano avoid this risk when he affirms that consciousness and the perception of qualities take place in the fleshy body. The entire body appears as a “collective organ of thought” (p. 4), position clearly influenced by Jean Paul Sartre and that resembles the affirmation that existential decisions involve not only the subject, instead, the decision involve all the human kind.

Catalano’s anthropocentrism means that we perceive the world as it is because our relation with our body, that is used to make that we use to interact with the world in a differentiated manner. Our consciousness, that sees the world with fleshy eyes, reveal objects as visible and coloured, making a non–tetic consciousness of the world and of itself. The non-tetic attribute signifies that we look at the world without posing our human intentions into an amorphous matter, definition borrowed from Sartre.

Consciousness and qualities has quantitative aspects, that can be related in scientific theories and the instruments we can use, that permit us consider qualities and consciousness quantitatively. But Catalano wrote that there is no reason to privilege scientific thought as if it were better than common thought and its ways to perceive the world. Here Catalano criticize a common place in contemporary philosophy that privileges scientific knowledge and takes common thought as non-reliable. Catalano is taken this position from Sartre, interpreting that the existentialist is hinting that “things are the way they are because consciousness if fleshy” (p. 107).

The continuous insistence in commonsense knowledge that gives us the world in its relation to a fleshy organism let Catalano to criticize the preferences that most of the contemporary philosophers give to scientific representation of the world. There is a difference between water considered as the fresh liquid that is capable to quench our thirst and the chemical formula of water as H₂O. Both are true, but belong to different worlds. The mechanical conception of body privileges chemical conception, but for the common sense the conception of the water defined by its qualities is better. The argument that is more true (if this expression is permitted) the scientific conception of water leads to other radical position, ¿why not take the mathematical relations as the very truth of things? Then Catalano states that “... common sense, science, and art give equally valid ways of interpreting our environment” (p. 83). This is very near to the conception of Nelson Goodman.

The emphasis in the anthropocentric view let Catalano make some interpretations of Sartre’s philosophy, defining absurdity, a medullar concept in the French philosopher: “... absurdity means that, without a relation to human existence, continuity over time would not exist” (p. 70). Catalano propose to understand the relation of common sense to history and to science, keeping present that language is rooted in our organic fleshy body. We should research different human activities and conceptions, “... returning to that of common sense, that we are able to keep our fleshy feet on mother Earth” (p. 94).

In last chapters, language is considered as the totality of corporal movements and its history, not as a formal system. From this point of view, language is the basis of worldmaking.

The book is divided into two parts, the first dedicated to explain the relation between the thought and the world, the second, shorter than the first, explains the link between names and things. The first part of the book contains four chapters and the second has three, total: seven.

In Chapter I, “Matter and Pure Enquiry”, argument that if “things exist independently of our conceptions and linguistic expressions about them, but not independently of their relations to the fact of our organic conscious existence. This bond is a worldmaking, wrote Catalano borrowing Goodman’s conception of worldmaking.

Catalano is contradicting the brain–body dualism because he sees that is replacing the Cartesian mind–body dualism. Instead, he emphasizes the reality of the entire fleshy body. As consciousness takes the form of sight, things are made visible; this is the reason why the body is a collective organ of thought. Catalano does not deny the subjectivity, instead, he take it for granted. As he deny the reduction of qualities to quantities, Catalano denied the possible reduction of consciousness to quantities: “if red can exist in the world as a quality irreducible to quantity, then consciousness is itself a quality irreducible to quantity” (p. 19).

For Catalano, Descartes eliminated fleshy body from thought and eliminated the historical construction of languages, mathematics and numbers. Descartes begun his reflection accepting a world of meanings that seem non-temporal and a–priori and this is the condition for his dualism, grounded in his ahistorical outlook on knowledge (p. 20).

A polemic section titled “Molding the Knower to the Known” is developed to criticize philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Descartes that assumed that an absolute conception of reality is possible and, then, they are independent of any human existence. “They mold both the knower and reality in a way that makes pure knowledge possible”. This peculiar way to criticize these philosophers is rich and interesting.

In this chapter is remarkable the emphasis in the historical process to acquire knowledge. Descartes’s dualism is a “result of his mistaken belief about inquiry as an ahistorical phenomenon”, stated Catalano. Descartes passed through all the efforts from different scientist and philosophers and the result is that he is amazed by the power of his own mind.

Chapter 2 continues Catalano’s efforts to ground his realism related to our organic body. Is prominent the consideration that everything that appears as a fact is an interpretation; knowledge is a worldmaking. Catalano’s most cogent arguments against reductionism and opposite to the claim that science gives us the essence of things are in this chapter.

The Third Chapter explains Catalano’s ontological worldmaking, while Chapter Four analyzes modal qualities from the anthropocentrically point of view that can be synthesized in three points: 1. The fleshy unit of our body makes it meaningful; 2. Our body is t he source of language as a collective and historically forged web of meanings; and 3. Our body is a source of possibilities. Catalano recognizes that these points are taken from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. We have to recognize that Catalano is using these concepts in a more polemical and a more didactic context than Sartre.

Chapter Five explains how necessary and contingent qualities are both essential to the definition of a thing, analyzing Kripke’s positions and Sartre’s. Chapter Sixth is written in order to explain the distinctive features of Catalano’s relational realism: qualities and natures perceived in a commonsense way truly exist as essential features of the world; and the bond between qualities and things is our fleshy body. The point is that we collectively mold matter into a web of meanings and, gradually, we interiorize this web of meanings not completely, producing the unconscious, a very illuminating direction to understand myths.

In the seventh chapter, Catalano explains universals as a particular aspect of the collective making of artifacts, a set of meaningful relations that we interiorize and give our personal stamp. Language is also a history of our collective actions an artifact forged along an historical process. Is important and very useful for the one who teaches children their first lectures, the conception of reading as a comprehension of meanings, instead the conception of a written language as a movement from sign to sign. Books are conceived as the first form of artificial intelligence, because in the activity of writing books the intelligence achieves more permanence and a degree of complexity not available to conversation (p. 162).

Summarizing the objections and postures of this intelligent book, Catalano rejects scientific materialism because it masks “an unjustifiable transcendent perspective of the world”. He objects pragmatism because it gives the impression of certain skepticism about essences; “essences can be modest earthy things [...] essences are not absolute...” They are always in relation to something: our flesh, an equation or the structures of experiments. (p. 170). His relational realism is also present in his insistence in no neutral, no privileged and no absolute perspective from which to judge to connect common sense, art and science.

The book concludes in stating that “we connect everything with ourselves”.