Four layers of thought

A subject that does not exist

Look in a university catalog for a department of “humanities and social science” and you will not find one. The Chinese phrase 人文社会科学 (rénwén shèhuì kēxué) is common in official use, and English has its own twin, “the humanities and social sciences,” but both are headings under which a university files philosophy, literature, history, law, economics, sociology, and more. In China’s official catalog of graduate disciplines, for example, these fields are spread across many separate categories. They are not one field with one method. This course says so openly, and then asks a bolder question: is there some structure of thinking that sits underneath all the subjects that study human beings?

Others have asked it. In 1883 the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey published an Introduction to the Human Sciences, an attempt to lay a foundation for the study of society and history. His German term, Geisteswissenschaften, literally “sciences of spirit,” covers what English splits into the humanities and the social sciences. In 1911 Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, argued that philosophy itself should be a “rigorous science,” and in his later work he returned to the question of how the human sciences differ from the natural ones. In 1942 Ernst Cassirer, writing in exile in Sweden, published The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. None of them produced a single method that the whole family accepted, and nobody since has either. What this course offers is not a method. It is a picture, and a claim about where thinking starts.

One note on how to read what follows. The argument here is an essayist’s: personal, bold, and full of vivid examples. We keep it, and we label it: where a sentence says “in this reading” or “this course argues,” it is the argument. Everything else, the dates, the quotations, the history, we have checked against sources, and where our material had it differently we say what the sources say.

Four layers, like the Earth

The picture starts with the planet. The Earth is built in layers: a solid inner core about 1,220 kilometers in radius, a liquid outer core, a mantle nearly 2,900 kilometers thick, a crust only 5 to 70 kilometers deep, and above it all an atmosphere that thins out with no sharp edge. Each layer does a job. Without that arrangement there would be no surface to stand on and no air to breathe.

In this reading, thinking has layers too, and they nest the same way. The outermost is humanistic thinking: the thinking that asks what a thing is for, what is good, what a life is worth, and how we should treat one another. Inside it sits scientific thinking, which takes one slice of the world at a time and asks how it works. Inside that sits technological thinking, which asks how to make something from what science has found. And at the center sits commercial thinking: how to turn the thing into a product or service that people will pay for, and keep it alive.

The point of the nesting is a claim about who contains whom. A phone, for instance, is a commercial product, built with technology, which rests on science (on what is known about electrons and radio waves), which began in someone’s decision that such knowledge was worth having at all. Ask the questions in the wrong order, the argument goes, and you cannot tell what you are doing or why. A company that thinks only commercially may not see that its product rests on a technology it does not understand, and one that understands the technology may not ask where it came from or where it leads.

The course’s favorite illustration is a business book, Tom Morris’s If Aristotle Ran General Motors (1997), which applies ancient philosophical ideas, about truth, beauty, goodness, and unity, to the running of a company. The title makes the point briefly: the biggest questions about running a company are not questions about companies.

Why this matters now

Why open a course with a picture of thinking? In this reading, because our own age has turned the layers upside down. The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that in rich countries people are shaped first as consumers, not producers, and in Liquid Modernity (2000) he described a modern world gone “liquid”: a world in which nothing keeps its shape for long, and jobs, relationships, and goods are all made to be replaced. This course adds an observation of its own, which is not Bauman’s: that when a society settles questions by what technology can do, the inner layers set the agenda, and the outer questions go unasked.

The internet is the example this course gives. It arrived with a dream of freedom: any person could speak to any other. In June 2013 Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the US National Security Agency, gave reporters documents showing the bulk collection of phone and internet data, and he has lived in Russia ever since; Oliver Stone dramatized the story in the 2016 film Snowden. Has the internet delivered the dream of freedom, or has it also made us more watched and more steered? Notice that this is not a technical question. No measurement of speed or storage will answer it. It is a question about what freedom is and whether we have more of it, and it can be argued only from the outside layer, the one that asks what things are for.

Cognition: from seeing to doing

If humanistic thinking is the outer layer, where does it start? This course answers: with cognition, which it does not treat as an abstract topic. Cognition, in this reading, is the loop by which a mind turns the world into action: it perceives something, understands it, judges what it means, predicts what will happen next, and then acts. The prediction is not about the far future. It is about the next second. What you do next is decided by how you read the situation.

That has a consequence worth pausing on: the same input can produce opposite actions, depending on the frame of reading. In Disney’s 1998 film Mulan, the emperor’s adviser Chi-Fu calls for quiet at the army camp: “Order. People, order.” A soldier answers, “I’ll have a pan-fried noodle.” It is a joke, and Chi-Fu does not laugh, but it works because the single word has two readings: a command, and a request for food. Nothing in the sound tells you which. Or take a horse. Its eyes sit on the sides of its head, which gives it a view of about 350 degrees, a blind spot directly in front of its nose, and a blind spot behind it. A horse is a prey animal, and it is highly sensitive to sudden movement and to shapes it does not know. Something darting out of the grass beside the path can be a pleasant surprise to a walker and a possible predator to a horse. The same sight, the same second, a different action.

A self-driving car runs a similar loop. Waymo, which runs paid driverless rides in several American cities, describes its software in stages: the system perceives what is around the car, predicts what other road users may do, plans a path, and then the car carries it out. When a driverless car brakes hard for a plastic bag, the fault is not in the brakes. It is in the reading.

What cognitive science leaves out

There is, of course, a science of cognition. One of its founders, George Miller, dated its start to a single day, September 11, 1956, at a symposium at MIT where he himself, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, and Noam Chomsky each presented new work. In 1978 a report to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation drew the field as a hexagon of six disciplines: philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and computer science (with artificial intelligence). This course simplifies it into three parts, mind (how thinking works), brain (the physical organ), and computer (can the process be modeled in a machine?), and then makes an objection: the result is rich in brain and machine and thin on the human being. Reason, it argues, is not the whole of a person.

Be careful here: cognitive science does study unconscious processing. Since the 1980s psychologists have mapped a “cognitive unconscious” of automatic, implicit processes, from subliminal perception to memories we cannot name. What it does not usually study is Freud’s unconscious of wishes and fears pushing from below. In a short essay of 1917 Freud listed three blows to humankind’s self-love. Copernicus showed that the earth is not the center of the universe. Darwin showed that we are descended from animals. Freud’s own blow, the psychological one, was that the ego is not master in its own house: much of what moves us goes on out of sight. This course calls this a Copernican revolution of the mind.

One correction of a popular picture. The iceberg that is so often drawn, with consciousness as the tip, is not Freud’s own image. The psychologist G. Stanley Hall used the iceberg simile in 1898, decades before anyone tied it to Freud. And the “one-eighth above water” that people quote comes from Ernest Hemingway, who described his own writing that way in 1932. In nature about one-tenth of an iceberg shows.

Caves, bottles, and glass cages

If cognition is a reading of the world, then a mind can be stuck in a bad reading. Philosophers have drawn that danger in several images. The first is Plato’s cave, in Book VII of the Republic: prisoners chained since childhood face a wall and take the shadows that a fire casts there for the whole of reality. The second is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fly in a fly-bottle. Philosophy, he wrote in the Philosophical Investigations, should show the fly the way out. The third, which this course adds, is a “glass cage”: a world that looks perfectly transparent, so that we feel we see everything, while we are in fact held in. The image has relatives, though not the same meaning: Max Weber spoke in 1904–05 of a “steel-hard casing” of rationalized life, which the English translation made an “iron cage,” and in 2014 Nicholas Carr titled a book about automation The Glass Cage. A glass cage is the more tempting, because you do not notice the bars.

Technology makes the third image sharper. Search and feeds show us more than any earlier age could see, and they also decide for us what we look at. In this reading, adding facts does not lead out of the cage by itself. Sometimes knowing more builds a bigger and clearer cage. What matters as much as what you take in is what you do not.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c. 1790–93

This course reads Blake’s sentence as the opposite of the cave. The doors of perception can be cleaned, and when they are, nothing has been added: the world simply shows what it already was. In this reading, that is the work of cognition. It teaches a person to suspect any finite thing that claims to be final. (Aldous Huxley took the title of his 1954 book The Doors of Perception from this line. Huxley’s own claim was that the brain filters experience, not, as is sometimes said, that most people use only a tenth of their minds: that figure is a myth.)

The question comes first

Which brings us back to the humanities’ starting move. Gertrude Stein died at the American Hospital in Neuilly, outside Paris, on July 27, 1946. According to her companion Alice B. Toklas, who told the story in her memoir What Is Remembered (1963), Stein asked, “What is the answer?” Toklas was silent. Stein then asked, “In that case, what is the question?” The words rest on one witness, written down seventeen years later, so take them as a story rather than as a record. But it is repeated because it is true to an experience: the answer you find depends on the question you ask, and a good solution to the wrong problem is worth nothing.

In this reading, that is the job of the outer layer. The sciences answer questions, technology solves problems, and business builds on both. Someone has to ask whether we are asking the right thing. Learning to catch the large, real question, before looking for the answer, is the habit this course wants to teach.