ABSTRACT
The Cartesian schism, as far as I understand it, is alive and well in current scholarship across a wide variety of disciplines. One of its implications is that most scientists regard ‘things’ like mind, consciousness, intention, will, and love as epiphenomenal at best and non-existent at worst. For the humanities, this implication means that most scholars just bracket out physics, matter, and biology and focus on ideas about and representations of ‘things.’ Both perspectives are reductionist, the sciences reduce mind to matter, and the humanities reduce matter to mind. In many cases, the term ‘mind’ has become anathema because neuroscientists now know more about the brain and computer scientists now know more about its ‘computing abilities.’ In both cases, reality has become a problem. In the case of the sciences, the reality of mind, intention, love, and the like is questioned, and in the case of the humanities, the reality of (and knowledge of) physics, matter, and biology is questioned—or just ignored. In the first case, we have matter without meaning, and in the second case, we have meaning without matter. Obviously, this problem is not the simple binary that I present here as there are some in-between positions. However, granted the complexity of the problem, reality seems to be at stake in this debate. It seems easy for scholars steeped in the symbolism (in the Peircean sense) of language to forget or ignore the groundedness of even symbols. It seems equally easy for scientists steeped in the reductionism of scientific method to forget or ignore the symbolicity (again in the Peircean sense) that emerges from matter.
