Who Am I and If So How Many?

Praise for
Who Am I? And If So, How Many?

‘When you’ve read this book, you’ve taken the first step on the way towards happiness … This book is indispensable.’

Elke Heidenreich,
Lesen!

‘A sweeping guide for getting to the bottom of things – for searching for answers and critically examining those answers. In short: narrated philosophy.’

Buchjournal

‘Precht’s rhetorically fine train of thought ranges beyond a spirit of the time and traverses its own limits. He poses systematic questions pertaining to everyday life. He casts a net of philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, and political events that broadens the perspective of the total human phenomenon.’

West German Broadcasting (WDR)

The Greek island of Naxos is the largest of the Aegean Cyclades islands. Mount Zas rises more than three thousand feet in the middle of the island. Goats and sheep graze on the fragrant fields; grapes and vegetables flourish. Back in the 1980s, Naxos still had a legendary beach at Agia Anna, with miles of sand dunes where a few tourists had put up bamboo huts and spent their time snoozing in the shade. One day in the summer of 1985, two young men who had just turned twenty were lying under a rock ledge. Jürgen, from Düsseldorf, was one; I was the other. We had just met at the beach a few days earlier, and we were discussing a book I had plucked from my father’s library to take along on vacation: a dog-eared paperback, its pages yellowed from the sun, with a Greek temple and two men in Greek clothing on the cover:
The Four Socratic Dialogues of Plato.

The atmosphere in which we passionately exchanged our modest ideas left as deep an impression on me as the sun did on my skin. That evening, while our group enjoyed cheese, wine, and melon, Jürgen and I continued our discussion. We were especially taken with the apologia, the speech Plato tells us Socrates gave before being sentenced to death for corrupting youth.

It eased – for a while, at least – my fear of death, a subject I found deeply unsettling. Jürgen was not as convinced.

I can’t remember what Jürgen looked like. I never ran into him again, and I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize him if I passed him on the street today. And I’ve heard from a reliable source that Agia Anna beach, to which I have never returned, is now a resort town with hotels, beach umbrellas, and lounge chairs you have to pay to lie in. But entire passages from Socrates’ apologia have stuck in my mind and will surely follow me right to the old age home. It remains to be seen whether they will retain the power to soothe me.

I never lost my passionate interest in philosophy, which has lived on since my days in Agia Anna. When I came home from Naxos, I signed up for a stultifying community service job in lieu of joining the military. My job as a parish worker did not exactly spark bold ideas; once I’d seen the Lutheran Church from the inside, I warmed up to Catholicism. But I did retain my interest in seeking the meaning of a life well lived, and in finding convincing answers to the great questions in life. I decided to study philosophy.

My course work in Cologne got off to an inauspicious start. I had pictured philosophers as fascinating people living lives as exhilarating and uncompromising as their ideas: people like Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, or Jean-Paul Sartre. But my vision of bold ideas and a bold life evaporated the instant I caught sight of my new teachers: boring middle-aged gentlemen in pedestrian brown or navy suits. I thought of the writer Robert Musil’s surprise that the modern and progressive engineers in the Wilhelminian era who were conquering new worlds on land, in water, and in the skies still sported old-fashioned handlebar mustaches, vests, and pocket watches. It struck me that the philosophers in Cologne were similarly failing to apply their inner freedom of mind to their outer lives. Still, one of them ultimately taught me how to think by training me to probe for the ‘why’ behind every question and not to settle for easy answers. He
impressed upon me the need to keep my lines of thought and argumentation unbroken, and to be careful to build each individual step on the one before it.

My student days were wonderful. My memory has merged them into one long succession of stimulating readings, spontaneous cooking, leisurely talks over noodle dinners, cheap red wine, heated classroom debates, and endless rounds of coffee in the cafeteria, where we’d put our philosophical education to the test, arguing about the limits of knowledge and what it means to lead a good life. We also analyzed soccer games and wondered why men and women had so much trouble getting along. The great part about philosophy is that there is never an end to it. It is also wonderfully interdisciplinary. The obvious career choice for me would have been to stay at the university. But the lives my professors were leading seemed drearily uninviting. I was also bothered by how ineffectual academic philosophy was. Essays and books were read with an eye to picking them apart. The symposia and conferences I attended as a doctoral student stripped away any illusions I might have had about the participants’ interest in fostering communication.

Still, the questions and the books stayed with me as time went on, and a year ago I realized that there are very few satisfying introductions to philosophy. Of course there are plenty of witty books full of quips and brainteasers, but they were not the ones I had in mind, nor were the handy guides to the lives and works of selected philosophers or introductions to their writings. What I couldn’t seem to find was a systematic discussion of the major overarching questions. A good deal of what passes for an introduction to philosophy is merely a parade of currents of thought and isms. These kinds of books are typically too historically oriented for my liking, or they are unwieldy and insipid.

The reason for this unappetizing state of the literature is
obvious
: universities rarely foster innovation. Even today, academia privileges the regurgitation of secondary texts over intellectual creativity. What I find especially problematic is the designation of
philosophy as a field separate from other disciplines. While my professors were explaining human consciousness on the basis of Kant’s and Hegel’s theories, their colleagues in the medical school just down the street were conducting highly enlightening
experiments
with brain-damaged patients. But ‘just down the street’ is quite a long distance at a university. Professors in different disciplines might as well live on different planets.

How do philosophical, psychological, and neurobiological findings about the nature of consciousness intertwine? Do they clash or complement one another? Is there a ‘self’? What are feelings? What is memory? The most intriguing questions did not even make it into the philosophical curriculum when I was a student, and, as far as I can tell, far too little has changed today.

Philosophy is not the study of history. Of course we need to preserve our heritage and to keep inspecting and refurbishing the historic structures of our intellectual life, but the academy spends far too much time and effort looking backward, especially when you consider that philosophy is not nearly as etched in the stone of its past as many believe. The history of philosophy is to a great extent a history of intellectual climates and trends, of knowledge that was forgotten or suppressed, and of numerous apparently new beginnings that seem so new only because much of what had been thought before was neglected. Ideas rarely appear out of thin air. Most philosophers have constructed their ideas on the ruins of their forebears’, but not, as they have often thought, on the ruins of the history of philosophy as a whole. Many clever insights and approaches fall by the wayside, while quirky and improbable ideas continue to be reconsidered and revived. And many philosophers themselves waver between new insights and old prejudices. Back in the eighteenth century, David Hume was in many respects an exceptionally modern thinker, but his attitude toward certain nations, especially in Africa, was chauvinistic and racist. In the century that followed, Friedrich Nietzsche became one of the most incisive critics in the field of philosophy, but his own ideals for man were kitschy, presumptuous, and downright preposterous.

Moreover, the influence of a thinker does not necessarily depend on whether his or her insights were actually correct. Friedrich Nietzsche had a huge impact on philosophy even though most of what he said was not nearly as new and original as it sounded. Sigmund Freud was rightly considered one of the greatest innovators who ever lived, the many flawed details of his psychoanalysis notwithstanding. And the enormous philosophical and political significance of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is disproportionate to the many incongruities in his speculations.

The history of Western philosophy also reveals that most skirmishes play out within well-defined binary oppositions, in feuds between materialists and idealists, or empiricists and rationalists. These approaches appear and reappear in every conceivable shade and combination, and in ever-new guises. Materialism – the belief that there is nothing, neither God nor ideals, outside of what we apprehend with our senses – first came into vogue in the eighteenth century during the French
Enlightenment
, and it resurfaced in the second half of the nineteenth century in reaction to advances in the field of biology and to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Today materialism is enjoying its third heyday in connection with modern findings in neuroscience. Between those points, however, there were phases in which an array of idealist thinking predominated. In contrast to materialists, idealists put very little stock in knowledge gained by the senses, relying instead on the largely independent power of reason and the ideas it generates. Of course these two labels have encompassed a great variety of motives and models over the course of the history of philosophy. Plato’s idealism differed sharply from Kant’s. And this is why no ‘true’ history of philosophy can be written as a chronological succession of the great philosophers or as a history of philosophical currents, which would require glossing over a great deal of vital information.

This introduction to philosophical questions of human existence and mankind is therefore not arranged along historical lines. It is not a history of philosophy. Immanuel Kant divided the great issues 
facing mankind into a series of questions: What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? What is man? These questions lend themselves well to the organization of this book, apart from the last, which is addressed in detail by the first three, so I have not devoted a separate section to it.

The classic epistemological question of what we can know about ourselves has extended far beyond the bounds of philosophy and is now centered in neuroscience, which explores the foundations of our cognitive faculties and capacity for knowledge. Philosophy functions somewhat like an adviser to help neuroscience clarify its undertaking. In this book I present a highly personal selection of stimulating insights that philosophy still has to offer in examining these fundamental questions, through the lens of a generation that was marked by tremendous upheaval and helped usher in modernity. The physicist Ernst Mach was born in 1838, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in 1844, the pioneer in
neuroscience
Santiago Ramón y Cajal in 1852, and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in 1856. A mere sixteen years separate the birth dates of these four pioneers of modern thought, whose lasting impact can hardly be overstated.

The second part of the book turns to an ethical and moral question: What should I do? It begins by exploring basic issues pertaining to why people act morally and the extent to which good or evil behavior accords with human nature. Here, too, philosophy is no longer the only one standing at the lectern; neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science now have something of substance to contribute. Once man is defined as an animal capable of moral judgment, and we recognize that stimuli in the brain reward moral actions, natural science retreats to the background, because the many practical questions that our society is tackling today require philosophical responses. To tackle issues such as abortion and euthanasia, genetic engineering and reproductive medicine, or environmental and animal ethics, science isn’t enough; this is the ideal playing field for philosophical discussions and considerations.

In the third part, ‘What Can I Hope For?’ I consider several central questions that most people ponder in their lives – questions about happiness, freedom, love, God, and the meaning of life. Such questions are not easy to answer, but they merit serious thought.

The theories and views that are often thrown together quite casually in this book are actually from disciplines that rarely intersect in scholarly studies. Even so, I think it makes sense to combine them in this manner, although I am fully aware that specialists in each field would pick apart many of the specifics. The various topics also take us on a little trip around the globe to the scenes of the events – to Ulm, where Descartes founded modern philosophy in a farmhouse, to Königsberg, where Immanuel Kant lived, to Vanuatu, home of the world’s happiest people according to an international survey, and so forth. I have had the privilege of meeting in person some of the brain researchers introduced in this book – Eric Kandel, Robert White, and the late Benjamin Libet – and two of the philosophers, Peter Singer and the late John Rawls. I learned a great deal by listening to and debating with them and came to realize that the merit of one or another theory does not necessarily emerge in an abstract comparison of theories, but in the benefits that can be reaped from them.

We should never stop asking questions, because a combination of learning and enjoyment is the key to a fulfilled life. Learning without enjoyment wears you down, and enjoyment without learning is mind-numbing. This book aims to awaken and enhance the reader’s pleasure in thinking, and it will have succeeded if the reader learns to live a more mindful life based on progressive self-awareness and takes the reins of his or her own life, perhaps like Friedrich Nietzsche, who sought to become the ‘poet’ of his own life (not that it worked for him). Nietzsche commented in a fragment: ‘It is a good ability to be able to observe one’s condition with an artistic eye and even in pain and suffering, awkwardness, and matters of that sort to have the Gorgon gaze that
instantaneously
petrifies everything into a work of art.’

And while we are on the subject of artistry, this introduction would not be complete without a word about the book’s title. It is a remark by a great philosopher, and my good friend, the writer Guy Helminger. One night, when we’d had too much to drink, I was worried about him – though he can certainly hold his liquor better than I can. When he started holding forth loudly on the street, I asked him if he was okay. ‘Who am I? And if so, how many?’ he answered hoarsely, with a wide-eyed stare, tossing his head histrionically, which made me realize that if he could carry on like this, he was quite capable of finding his own way home. But his question stuck in my head. It could serve as a slogan for modern philosophy and neuroscience in an age of deep-seated doubt about the self and the continuity of experience. I owe Guy a huge debt of gratitude – above and beyond this pronouncement. It was through Guy that I met the woman who is now my wife. Without her, my life would not be the happy life that it is.