Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

NOTES

ONE On Human Nature

1. Santiago Zabala, introduction to Rorty and Vattimo, Future of Religion.

2. Balthasar, Presence and Thought, 1.

3. Rorty and Vattimo, Future of Religion, 17.

4. James, “On Some Hegelisms” in his Will to Believe.

5. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 42 (emphasis in original).

6. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 9, 11; Russell, Analysis of Mind, 230.

7. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 27.

8. Ibid., 7.

9. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 359.

10. Russell, Analysis of Mind, 236.

11. Pinker, Blank Slate, 56–57. See Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), and Robert Borofsky, Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).

12. Pinker, Blank Slate, 56.

13. Ibid., 69.

14. Pinker, Blank Slate, 42.

15. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 80.

16. Grotius, On the Truth of the Christian Religion, 11.

17. Ibid., 13.

18. See James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 389, note 10.

TWO The Strange History of Altruism

1. Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, trans. J. H. Bridges (London: Trübner, 1865), 34.

2. Ibid., 16.

3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Comte, Auguste (Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier)”; James, “On Some Hegelisms,” in his Will to Believe, 198, note 3.

4. Spencer, Data of Ethics, 188–189, 201–202.

5. Gazzaniga, Human, 107–108, 109.

6. Ibid., 119.

7. Ibid., 119; Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 56, 33.

8. Wilson, Consilience, 96–97.

9. James, “On Some Hegelisms” 201.

10. Wilson, On Human Nature, 73.

11. Ibid., 156; Gazzaniga, Human, 106 (parentheses in original); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 44.

12. Spencer, Data of Ethics, 212. See Dugatkin, Altruism Equation, 86–106, for a discussion of Hamilton’s work.

13. See Dugatkin, Altruism Equation, 143–146.

14. Ibid., 73.

15. Quoted in ibid., 98.

16. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 52.

17. Dawkins, “Selfish Genes and Selfish Mernes,” 143.

18. Searle, Mind, 302–303.

19. Ibid., 81.

THREE The Freudian Self

1. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 149–150.

2. Ibid., 150.

3. Ibid., 155.

4. Ibid., 168, 156, 157.

5. Karl Lueger quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936. Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 35.

6. Freud, Future of an Illusion, 6; Spengler, Decline of the West, 182.

7. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 137, 196–197; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 61–62.

8. Freud and Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 195–196, 71.

9. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 19.

10. Spengler, Decline of the West, 250.

11. Spencer, Data of Ethics, 188–189.

12. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 51.

13. There is a recent English translation of Fichte’s Addresses by Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), the first in eighty-six years. Quotations are taken from the 1922 translation, as reprinted in 1979.

14. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 86.

15. Ibid., 268–269.

16. Spengler, Decline of the West, 350, 352–353.

17. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 33.

18. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Metaphysics.”

19. Spengler, Decline of the West, 215.

20. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 26, 27 (emphasis in original).

21. Ibid., 26–27.

22. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 12–13.

FOUR Thinking Again

1. Wilson, Consilience, 99; Pinker, How the Mind Works, 924–926.

2. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 324–327, 456–459.

3. Rene Descartes, The Method, Meditations, and Philosophy of Descartes, trans. John Veitch (N.p.: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), 270.

4. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 4, 64, 21, 30.

5. Wilson, On Human Nature, 201.

6. Psalms 8:4; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 21–23.

7. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 556, 561.