02 (20-36)_Philosophy.pmd


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PHILOSOPHY AND HEALING: RESTORING AN ANCIENT
ALLIANCE1

Edward J. Alam
Notre Dame University-Louaize, Lebanon

Abstract

We normally do not consider the close proximity of philoso-
phy and medicine. Yet many early philosophers were physicians
and drew close parallels between philosophy and healing. This
paper will investigate the value of this analogy, specifically with
regard to the insights of science in contrast to the appreciation of
human design. It will also consider the importance of memory. To
re-member implies an intelligent and willed striving for courage
and hope in the face of the supreme mystery, namely, death. It
leads to the realization that the philosopher’s meditation upon
death reflects upon the value of life.

A few months ago a well known orthopedic surgeon in Beirut
told me I needed a back operation.  I had a seriously herniated disc put-
ting pressure on my sciatic nerve, causing numbness and pain in my leg
and toes, making it difficult to even walk normally.  I decided immedi-
ately to get a second opinion, only to be told by another Orthopedic that
indeed an operation was necessary.  Totally disconcerted by the bad news,
as it meant, among other things, a cancelation of philosophy seminars in
India, Poland, and the Ukraine, which I had long prepared for, I told my
wife I wanted yet a third opinion, but she consistently reminded me that
both doctors had impeccable international reputations, and that we had
seen “with our own eyes” how the disc was protruding out into the spine.
It was true. Each doctor had patiently examined the MRI’s with us and
pointed out to us exactly what was wrong.  But I was still resisting an
operation because the pain was slowly going away, and the numbness
was subsiding, even though I was still in pretty bad shape.  When I had
finally resigned myself to what I thought was the inevitable, I met by
mere chance a neurologist, to whom I hurriedly explained my case, rather
inappropriately, I might add, as the social circumstances of our chance



21

meeting was not the place for a medical consultation.  In spite of this, he
gave me his card and told me to make an appointment.  I promptly handed
him the MRI’s when I met him in his office, expecting the worse.  After a
few moments of examining the pictures he said “OK, let’s have the real
examination now”.  Surprised, I blurted out, “But what did you see?”  He
said, “Well, I just saw some electronic images, but now I want to examine
you; I don’t treat images, I treat persons”.  It then occurred to me that the
previous doctors had been much more interested in the images of me than
in me. While leaving his office, I felt triumphant.  No surgery.  No more
medicine. No more tests, just some more rest, some common sense cau-
tion, some physical therapy, and eventually some swimming and light
stretching.  I had to miss the trip to India, but the philosophy seminars in
Poland and the Ukraine, the themes of which just happened to be on the
identity of the human person, were back on the table.  With renewed
vigor I continued my work on the subject of personal identity, armed with
a new insight into some of the challenges our ever so technological age
presents__challenges that have everything to do with the subject I am privi-
leged to speak to you about today, and which my title, philosophy and
healing: restoring an ancient alliance, tries to capture.

This brief personal overture is by no means meant to reject tech-
nology or specialization in modern medicine or in any other branch of
knowledge for that matter, to do so of course would be to unwisely ig-
nore a plethora of advantageous achievements that form the very fabric
of improved modern society and culture.  But I must say that, as someone
who teaches philosophy, and as someone who hopes to become a real
philosopher someday, I do read with great sympathy people like Dr. Patricia
Benner, who argue convincingly that due to the primacy of instrumental
reason, which “surrounds technology in a certain prestige and aura. . . the
technological approach in medicine has often sidelined the kind of care
involved in treating the patient as a whole person with a life story, and not
as the locus of a technological problem”.2  I am also in sympathy with
someone like Andrew Taylor Still, the father of osteopathy, who empha-
sized in the 19th century the importance of seeing deep and real connec-
tions between the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions
of human beings, something that is today captured somewhat by the con-
cept “holistic health” which, I assume, is now widely accepted by medical
professionals worldwide.

Although Still was somewhat revolutionary in his day, a long view
of the history of medicine reveals that in some ways he was actually re-



22

covering a vision of medicine that was really quite ancient, one, that is,
wherein many medical doctors were also philosophers.  If we take even a
superficial glance at the history of philosophy, in fact, we see that some of
the most prominent philosophers were also medical doctors.  Beginning
with Hippocrates himself, who was known simply as the wise man, and
whom Aristotle referred to as the “great Hippocrates” a rare compliment
coming from Aristotle, continuing with Galen, Moses Maimonides, Ibn
Sina, and many more, one could almost say that to be a doctor in the
ancient and medieval world in both east and west meant also to be a
philosopher.  The famous Stoic philosopher and great Roman Emperor,
Marcus Aurelius, carefully chose a certain Galen as his court physician
not only because of Galen’s superior medical knowledge, but because of
his wisdom, exemplified in his well known treatise titled That the best
Doctor is also a Philosopher__something a philosopher of the caliber of
Marcus Aurelius__could certainly appreciate.  Galen argues in this 2nd cen-
tury treatise that if the major impetus in becoming a medical doctor is
anything other than the complete devotion to the art of healing the pa-
tient, then another profession should be chosen.  When it comes to mak-
ing money, Galen is even more stoical than his stoical emperor since he
argues that not only is the doctor not to be motivated by financial profit,
but must learn to despise it.  For Galen, in fact, healing is an art, having
much in common with music and poetry. The famous medieval Jewish
philosopher/physician, too, Moses Maimonides, in his celebrated medical
oath, which echoed the major tenets of the Hippocratic Oath itself, spoke
about the medical profession as a divine calling, a vocation, a love of
wisdom.  And Ibn Sina, perhaps the greatest Islamic philosopher ever,
who had considerable influence on Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest
Christian philosophers ever, saw his own life as a philosopher and physi-
cian as profoundly and naturally complementary: one was all about the
soul or the mind, the other was all about the body, but both, more than
anything else, had to do with the love of healing, the loving desire to heal
the whole human person__a desire that had everything to do with know-
ing what it meant to be human, and with Philia-Sophia loving wisdom, in
other words, with being a philosopher.

Now although we can speak about the healing of the soil or the
oceans or the planet, all these uses of the term are only analogous uses;
they are all derived from and even presuppose and require a more funda-
mental healing, namely, a healing of the human person. But a great deal is
assumed here.  First and foremost, an assumption concerning the very



23

existence and nature of such a thing as the human person, and secondly,
the assumption that something has gone wrong with it.  Questions con-
cerning human nature, personhood, and the meaning of healing a wounded
humanity have traditionally been reserved for the domains of philosophy,
psychology, and theology, but with the advent of the biological revolu-
tion in 1953,3 biology has gotten in on the discussion as well.  This is
especially true of questions concerning human nature and personhood in
so far as they relate to queries into the complex processes of the brain;
such queries have developed into what some are calling a new science of
mind.  Aided by remarkable accomplishments in molecular biology, this
new science of mind or biology of the brain attempts to unite philosophy,
psychology, and psychoanalysis in novel ways when it comes to ques-
tions concerning human nature and personal identity-leading to contro-
versial positions such as the one suggesting that it is “each person’s brain
[that] creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free
will”.4  And so whereas Still’s ideas at the end of the 19th century regard-
ing the need to see how the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual
dimensions of the human person are all connected might enjoy widespread
support today, under the modern heading of “holistic health” the very
meanings of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual have under-
gone and are still undergoing radical changes that make it difficult to put
forward a clear account of what constitutes personal human identity or to
describe accurately what is meant by human nature.  It seems to me that
if any talk about the connection between healing the human person and
loving wisdom, that is, philosophy, is to make any sense, we must try to
better understand these changes.

To do this, it seems proper to begin with the physical, seemingly
the least complicated among the four, and to point out that with the influ-
ential work of the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician,
Rene Descartes, matter and the physical were reduced to mere extension
and set in dualistic opposition to mind. This conception of the material or
the physical had significant influence on the thought of important physi-
cists and was partly responsible for the emergence of ‘classical’ Newtonian
physics, wherein the movements of matter were thought to be completely
predictable and stable given a conception of time and space as absolute.
For centuries, classical Newtonian mechanics held sway until a new con-
ception of matter began to develop in the 20th century. At a public lecture
in Greece some four decades ago, the great physicist Werner Heisenberg
gave voice to what this new conception of matter was when he stated:



24

If I endeavor today to take up some of the old problems
concerning the structure of matter and the concept of natu-
ral law, it is because the development of atomic physics in
our own day has radically altered our whole outlook on
nature and the structure of matter. It is perhaps not an
improper exaggeration to maintain that some of the old
problems have quite recently found a clear and final solu-
tion. So it is permissible today to speak about this new
and perhaps conclusive answer to questions that were for-
mulated here [in Greece by philosophers] thousands of
years ago.5

The radical alteration of outlook, of course, is a reference to the
way twentieth century physics overcame the “classical” Newtonian view
of matter as constant and predictable. More specifically, Heisenberg’s
investigations into what takes place when elementary particles collide at
adequately high levels of energy led him to assert that eventually all par-
ticles are either destroyed, leaving behind just radiation, or are converted
into other particles. From this observation, he concluded that there must
be an underlying substratum that potentially provides for all of the differ-
ent forms of matter, but which does not have any of its properties. In a
particularly precise formulation of this, wherein we are able to see ex-
actly what he meant when he stated that “it is permissible today to speak
about this new and perhaps conclusive answer to questions that were
formulated here [in Greece by philosophers] thousands of years ago”, he
explains:

We can say that all particles are made of the same funda-
mental substance, which can be designated energy or mat-
ter; or we can put things as follows: the basic substance
“energy” becomes matter by assuming the form of an el-
ementary particle.6

What is remarkable about this to me is that we find one of the
twentieth century’s most important physicists answering a fundamental
question about matter in terms so strikingly close to those of Aristotle’s
that it sounds like Aristotle himself.  Moreover, the work of scientists
such as Michael Faraday and Philip Anderson have shown analogously
that because matter is neither a conductor nor an insulator, it only stands



25

to reason that it is supple enough to potentially become both, again, a
very Aristotelian sounding description of matter as a kind of potency with
infinite flexibility and unlimited suppleness.

For a long time now my hunch has been that just as the new phys-
ics has to some extent vindicated Aristotle’s doctrine of matter, modern
molecular biology will eventually vindicate his doctrine of form and soul.
What I mean is that if it were not for the new physics, we would never
have had the breakthroughs in molecular biology that we have had. And if
the new physics really does vindicate Aristotle’s doctrine of matter, then
the breakthroughs in molecular biology, which are essentially dependent
upon the new physics, must also be somehow related to Aristotle’s doc-
trine of matter. I thus concluded some years ago now that since Aristotle’s
doctrine of matter necessarily presupposes and includes his doctrine of
form and soul or mind, then both modern twentieth century physics and
modern molecular biology, which depends upon it, also accepts, to some
degree, perhaps unwittingly, Aristotle’s doctrine of form and soul or mind.
I will not attempt to lay out the entire argument here,7 as it is long and
arduous and presupposes a mastery of Aristotle’s linguistic apparatus,
but I do want at least to suggest that Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul is not
at all outdated by new developments in biology, and that the new biology
may in some ways come to vindicate some of Aristotle’s penetrating in-
sights. This traditional philosophical account of the soul, in fact, comple-
ments what Still had to say about the second component of what it means
to be human, namely, the mental, and which now I would like to say
something about.

This seems especially important today given the advent of the
new science of mind or biology of the brain, which, as mentioned, has
recently been attempting, due to the dramatic and exciting achievements
in molecular biology, to unite philosophy, psychology, and psychoanaly-
sis in novel ways, particularly when it comes to questions concerning
human nature and personal identity__and has generated a number of con-
troversial positions regarding the origin of mind__positions related in par-
ticular to the complex phenomenon of memory.  If we are to say some-
thing meaningful about the healing of the human person, in other words,
we should seek to address the question of the nature of mental reality in
the light of what is, perhaps, one of the greatest mysteries of all, namely,
the mystery of what it means to be human.  As early as the end of the 5th

century BCE, in fact, Hippocrates states in a treatise titled On Ancient
Medicine “that the only source for precise knowledge on the [nature of



26

man] is medicine”, but then he goes on to tell us that to acquire such
knowledge the doctor “must embrace medicine itself correctly in its to-
tality” which is to say “in that historia [history] or investigation that con-
sists in knowing what man is, the causes of his formation, and all the rest,
with precision”.8

It has probably become evident by now that I will not speak to
you this afternoon about ethics, at least not directly.  Nor, then, will I
address directly the complex subjects of bioethics and medical ethics,
which is what one might expect from my title; after all, what else would a
philosopher addressing medical professionals and doctors speak about? I
have avoided these subjects not only because I am not a competent bioet-
hicist, but because a lot of what goes on in bioethics and medical ethics
today is misleading in that it misses what philosophy has traditionally
understood by ethics as a branch of philosophy organically joined to the
other major branches of philosophy: aesthetics, anthropology, metaphys-
ics, and epistemology.  My impression is that, today, the rich and ancient
branch of philosophy known as ethics has been trivialized, often times
with the best of intentions, by lawyers, judges, medical professionals,
doctors, journalists, economists,  and professionals in advertising and
marketing.9  Even the few competent bioethicists who really know ethics
in this fuller sense as an integral branch of philosophy, and who also know
biology deeply, must face the ever-growing challenge from the legal arena,
which dictates the agenda and development of bioethics in ways that tend
to be legalistic and reductionist.  By focusing directly on the mystery of
what man is, to quote Hippocrates, or of what it means to be human, that
is to say, on philosophical anthropology, rather than on ethics, which be-
cause of these present day trends, tends to digress into various kinds of
moralizing, I hope to provide a wiser, that is, a more philosophical ac-
count of this mystery__one that sees aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemol-
ogy, and ethics as all integral and important elements of this search.  I
shall seek to do this, as I’ve indicated, in the context of what leading
experts are saying about the new science of mind or biology of the brain
as it relates to exploring the mystery of consciousness, memory, personal
identity, and free will.

One such leading expert is Eric Kandel, winner of the 2000 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who in his book, In Search of Memory,
reveals that, like many of the great doctors of old, his deepest interests
are philosophical. Fascinated by the phenomenon of memory, as the title
of his book indicates, he dwells upon how essential memory is not only



27

for “enabling us to solve the problems we confront in everyday life”, but
for the very continuity of individual identity.  At one point he states, “[w]e
are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember”.10  As
a physician, his interest in the new science of mind is undoubtedly moti-
vated by his hope to discover better treatments for memory loss and post-
traumatic stress disorder, both of which we now know contribute to psy-
chiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, but the ultimate
impetus in his research has to do with, in his own words, “penetrating the
mystery of consciousness, including the ultimate mystery: how each
person’s brain creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of
free will”.11  With this, Kandel reveals both his deep philosophical inter-
ests and his philosophical assumptions__assumptions which seem to be
gaining ground in elite circles and which, in my judgment, need to be
questioned at a fundamental level.  For so much is at stake here in terms
of what it means to be human that will in turn determine what human
healing is really all about. There is no doubt, then, that Kandel is both
philosopher and physician, and seems to have become a kind of model for
many elite and cutting edge physicians to emulate.  His desire to merge
philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis with the biology of the brain
is certainly a step in the right direction with respect to both holistic learn-
ing and holistic healing and, in this, his approach to both education and
the human being is commensurate with the approach of the great ancient
and medieval doctor/philosophers of old, who pursued knowledge in an
integrated, interdisciplinary, and non-fragmented way.

Thanks to Kandel’s discoveries, and the many related scientific
breakthroughs of the late 19th and 20th centuries in, for instance, magne-
tism and electricity, the various theories (often times competing) of evo-
lution, early genetics, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics (men-
tioned above), molecular biology and biochemistry, the thermodynamics
of non-linear open systems far from equilibrium, astrophysics and others,
the reductionism of 17th century mechanism has finally been overcome.12

We have come a long way from the Cartesian reduction of matter to mere
extension; the multi-layered variety and complexity of natural phenom-
ena revealed by these developments in science is staggering, but what is
even more impressive is that in the midst of this remarkably diverse and
nearly unfathomable vision of nature, there are still those rare geniuses
like Kandel who strive for unity and integration in knowledge and resist
the almost inevitable fragmentation and departmentalization accompany-
ing intense specialization.



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In spite of all this, however, Kandel’s efforts to develop this new
science of mind by merging philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis
with what he consistently calls the biology of the brain rather than a biol-
ogy of the brain, may also be moving towards a reductionism, albeit dif-
ferent than the mechanistic reductionism that the late 19th and 20th cen-
tury discoveries in science overcame.  But reductionism, if in fact this is
where he is going, in whatever form is reductionism and therefore is al-
ways misleading.  Just as the Cartesian mechanical philosophy tried to
reduce all the other sciences, including philosophy, to a particular math-
ematical method, Kandel, too, reveals certain reductionist tendencies, but
in terms of a biology of the brain, a biology which he insists on calling the
biology of the brain, as if there were only one biological approach, and
which he uses synonymously with the phrase the new science of mind, or
biology of mind insisting in both cases on not using the definite article to
qualify mind.  We should not, he says, refer to the new science of the
mind, or to the new biology of the mind, but to the new science of mind
or the new biology of mind. These are not pedantic hair splitting particu-
larities, but reveal what the elite in this field hold and teach concerning
the very meanings of the terms mind and brain. To their great credit, and
against Descartes’ mind/body dualism, they hold, as Aristotle did, that the
human mind and the human brain are inseparable, but in stressing the
unity, they tend to lose sight of the subtle distinction, or better yet to
explain the subtle distinction in ways that tend to reduce mind to brain.
Explaining the first of five principles upon which the new science of mind
is based, a science which Kandel believes will be as important to the 21st

century as the biology of the gene was to the 20th, he states,

. . . mind and brain are inseparable.  The brain is a complex
biological organ of great computational capability that
constructs our thoughts and emotions, and controls our
actions.  The brain is responsible not only for relatively
simple motor behaviors, such as running and eating, but
also for the complex acts that we consider quintessentially
human, such as thinking, speaking, and creating works of
art.  Looked at from this perspective, mind is a set of op-
erations carried out by the brain, much as walking is a set
of operations carried out by the legs, except dramatically
more complex.13



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The analogy is an interesting one per se: the legs are to walking as
the brain is to the mind.  At one level, I can imagine any one of our ancient
or medieval philosopher/doctors agreeing with it, but to turn the analogy
into a principle, and the very first one at that, is problematic on a number
of fronts-not the least of which is the way it is then taught dogmatically at
elite institutions as a fundamental tenet of the new science of mind, a
premise of sorts which ultimately leads to the conclusion that the new
science or biology of mind, using the power of molecular biology, prom-
ises to explain the remaining mysteries of life including how the brain
“creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free will”.
And this, to be sure, our pre-Cartesian, medieval and ancient doctor/
philosophers would certainly not agree with, and, whatever it is worth,
nor would I.

Cognizant of just how reductionist this sounds, those in the field
are quick to point out, as Kandel does, in a defensive mode, that for
“biologists working on the brain, mind loses none of its power or beauty
when experimental methods are applied to human behavior”. These same
biologists, among whom he is one of the most prominent of course, he
goes on to say, “do not fear that mind will be trivialized by a reductionist
analysis, which delineates the component parts and activities of the brain.
On the contrary”, he argues, “most scientists believe that biological analysis
is likely to increase our respect for the power and complexity of the mind”.14

I suspect he is right here, but be this as it may, what he avoids really
explaining and defending, which is typical of those in the field, is actually
what matters most, namely, the thesis that the human mind, conscious-
ness, memory, creative thinking, and spirituality all “originate” in a physi-
cal organ.  This is simply assumed to be the case based on the novel and
incredible ability to identify how each mental function in the brain (from
simple reflexes to complex creative acts) is “carried out by specialized
neural circuits in different regions of the brain”,15 and, moreover, based
on the fact that we now know that “these circuits are made up of the same
elementary signaling units, the nerve cells”, and that the “the neural cir-
cuits use specific molecules to generate signals within and between [these]
nerve cells”.  Admittedly, these are extraordinary accomplishments, but I
do not see how such remarkable achievements prove in any way that the
“brain creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free
will”. They only indicate just how intricate the complex functions of the
brain are to the phenomena of consciousness, memory, creative thinking,
free will, and spirituality.  In other words, what the astonishing success of



30

the biology of the brain has shown is just how inseparable the human
mind (or human soul, to use the traditional word) and the human brain
really are.  But this insight is as old as Aristotle himself, who in develop-
ing the thought of his master, Plato, argued strongly against any mind/
body or spirit/matter dualism and provided a sophisticated account of the
differences without, however, compromising their fundamental unity.
Thomas Aquinas, in fact, one of the most famous medieval Aristotelian
philosophers goes so far as to say that the human mind or soul is not even
what it is without the physical body.  This Aristotelian account dominated
the western intellectual tradition right up until the time that Descartes
rejected it and introduced a matter/mind, body/soul dualism, which, as
I’ve mentioned a few times now, was finally overcome by the scientific
discoveries of the late 19th and 20th centuries, discoveries, which, like
Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty, vindicated to some extent Aristotle’s
rich and supple account of matter as potency.  We are still waiting, how-
ever, for the biological revolution to vindicate his account of form or soul
which cannot be separated from his account of matter; the two are mutu-
ally dependent and intertwined and are not intelligible unless taken to-
gether.  For this reason, I think the biological revolution, which itself
cannot be understood, and would not have occurred, without the prior
revolution in physics, will also lead to some kind of vindication of
Aristotle’s account of substantial form and soul.  This vindication may
very well come from the new interpretations that some molecular biolo-
gists are putting forth with respect to what the new science identifies as
its fifth and final principle, namely, the fact that “specific signaling mol-
ecules have been conserved__retained as it were__through millions of years
of evolution. . .[some of which] can be found today in our most distant
and primitive evolutionary relatives: single-celled organisms such as bac-
teria and yeast and simple multicellular organisms such as worms, flies,
and snails [that] use the same molecules to organize their maneuvering
through their environment [which] we use to govern our daily lives and
adjust to our environment”.18  From this amazing discovery, proponents
of the new science then conclude “that the human mind evolved from
molecules used by our lowly ancestors and that the extraordinary conser-
vation of the molecular mechanisms that regulate life’s various processes
also applies to our mental life”.19  To argue, however, from the astound-
ing discovery regarding the similarity of signaling molecules in all living
organisms (from the simplest to the most complex) to the conclusion that
the human mind therefore evolved from molecules used by our own lowly



31

ancestors, and that the extraordinary conservation of the molecular mecha-
nisms that regulate life’s various processes also applies to our mental life,
is problematic on a number of different levels: first, a strict identification
is made here between mind and brain without any discussion of why in
the long tradition of science and philosophy, many good thinkers have
always made a clear distinction between the two, without however dual-
istically separating them.  Second, to say that the human mind evolved
from molecules used by our lowly ancestors ignores what other molecu-
lar biologists are saying about these so-called “lowly ancestors”, namely,
that those closest to us may not have  been so lowly after all.  I refer here
to the developments that took place about a quarter of a century ago,
when John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas challenged traditional paleonto-
logical theory by suggesting in their book, The Monkey Puzzle (1982),
that the common ancestor we share with the gorilla and the chimpanzee
had distinctly human characteristics. They also suggested that the paleon-
tologists had been off by about fifteen million years in terms of when this
common ancestor lived, putting the date around five, rather than around
twenty, million years ago. In 1997, fifteen years after the publication of
The Monkey Puzzle, Simon Easteal of the Australian National University
declared that in using the latest procedures in molecular biology, he and
his colleagues had interpreted the DNA evidence in such a way as to
confirm what Gribbin and Cherfas had already suggested, that is, that
apes are descended from man, not man from the apes. Superficial com-
mentary hurriedly pitted the biologists against the paleontologists, sug-
gesting that the latter’s work had become irrelevant overnight. More in-
formed investigations, of course, point out the obvious error in such claims
by underscoring the fact that without paleontology, the so-called molecu-
lar clock20 is useless. It is not my concern to analyze how this molecular
clock works; it is enough to say that the ticks in this clock can only be
counted once a reasonably accurate date for the split between any two
species has already been provided, and such a split cannot be determined
without the fossil evidence of the paleontologists.

The real breakthrough came in 1967 when Berkeley’s Vincent
Sarich and Allan Wilson, building upon the work of George Nuttal and
Paul Ehrlich, eminent biologists of the late nineteenth century, and espe-
cially upon the work of Morris Goodman in the late 1950’s, began to
count the ticks of the molecular clock beginning with the split between
Old World monkeys and apes, which the fossil evidence had reasonably
situated at about thirty million years ago.21  Simply speaking, the count-



32

ing had to do with comparing monkey proteins with ape proteins. When
the counting was over, Sarich and Wilson claimed that gorillas, chimps,
and humans, all shared a common ancestor as recently as about five mil-
lion years ago. The 1980 specification of the entire DNA sequence for the
virus phiX 174, which led to the completion of the first map of the entire
human genome some twenty years later, seems to have vindicated the
findings of Sarich and Wilson, as well as improved upon the accuracy of
the date of the existence of the common ancestor that humans, chimps
and gorillas all have in common, putting it between 3.6 and 4 million
years ago. The new date stunned the scientific world because according
to reliable fossil evidence, our ancestors may have learned to walk up-
right well before this date. In the light of this new evidence, Gribbin and
Cherfas felt confident in their hypothesis that the common ancestor was
probably more human like than ape like,22 and went searching for further
evidence.

Where this search will ultimately lead is hard to say, but the point
I'm trying to drive home here is that although evolutionary theory is vir-
tually impossible to deny, the variations on the evolutionary theme are
diverse, complex, and nowhere near being agreed upon by the scientific
community.  Therefore, to speak about evolution as if it were one thing,
the details of which are unambiguous and well known facts, is to go way
beyond the available evidence.  Even the stunning genetic fact that chimps
and humans and gorillas are genetically as close (or closer in the case of
chimps and humans) as the goat is to the sheep or the zebra is to the
horse,23 98.4% to be exact, needs to be qualified.  That is to say, some
scientists are quick to remind us that although we were able to specify the
entire DNA sequence for the virus phiX 174, which in turn led to the
completion of the first map of the entire human genome about a decade
ago, it is still the case that the functions of about 97% of the human
genome is still waiting to be identified and remains largely undetermined;
to call this genetic material “junk” DNA, they tell us, simply because we
have not been able to identify its function, is misleading.  Scientists like
W. W. Gibb’s argue in fact that we may still find some gems among the
so-called junk.24

None of this of course is meant to call into question the impor-
tance of the biological revolutions in 1953, 1980, and 2000; it is meant,
rather, to challenge the position which uncritically reduces mind or soul
to brain based on the premise that these biological revolutions of the 20th

century are essentially the natural outcome of the very first biological



33

revolution in modernity, that is to say, the revolution spawned by Charles
Darwin's work in the 19th century.  We tend to forget that what was so
revolutionary about the 1859 publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Spe-
cies was not the idea of evolution per se, an idea which we find among
the ancient Ionian philosophers,25 but an idea that concerned the very
purpose of biology itself.  Before Darwin, the purpose of biology by and
large had been understood as an attempt to explain design in nature, but
Darwin “proposed. . . that evolution’s driving force [was] not a con-
scious, intelligent, or divine purpose, but a “blind” process of natural
selection, a completely mechanistic sorting process of random trial and
error based on hereditary variations”.26  In many ways, of course, this
idea was completely predictable given the influential epistemological
assumptions of the 17th century mechanical philosophy, and it is perfectly
commensurate with such a philosophy. But for some strange reason, many
of the very scientists who otherwise welcome the overthrow of this me-
chanical philosophy in say, the new physics, continue to hold on to a
variation of this mechanistic view when it comes to the new science of
mind.  Kandel, in fact, draws a clear straight line from Darwin to modern
biology right up to the new biology of the brain and suggests that just as
modern biology, following Darwin’s “blind” process assumption, “ask[ed]
us to believe that living beings, in all their beauty and infinite variety, are
merely the products of ever new combinations of nucleotide bases, the
building blocks of DNA’s genetic code”,27 so eventually will the new biol-
ogy, following this same Darwinian assumption, ask us to believe that
“consciousness is a biological process that will eventually be explained in
terms of molecular signaling pathways used by interacting populations of
nerve cells”.28  I have no doubt that Kandel is right, what I call into ques-
tion, rather, is whether or not any of these explanations are complete, or
ever will be complete, without taking up the question of what it is that
accounts for the ultimate unity of the human organism.

Naturally, this quandary surrounding the question of unity is rec-
ognized as the crux of the issue by many proponents of the new science,
including Kandel, and to his great credit, he seeks such unity in the mys-
tery of memory; this is why so much of his brilliant research on the brain
focuses on memory.  But the problem is that investigations into memory,
whether taken up by the neuroscientist, the philosopher, or the psycholo-
gist, will not provide any kind of unity when it comes to questions of
personal identity, human nature, or what is meant by healing this nature
unless one overcomes the mechanistic, “blind” process assumption and



34

admits that purpose and design are at the heart of what memory itself is:
“[i]n fact, design seems to be a common thread that runs through the
whole of nature.  Time and again, in cases that have been catalogued
since the dawn of biology, nature reveals that (1) its inhabitants are re-
markably suited to fit their environment and (2) the various parts and
systems that constitute organisms are remarkably suited to work in con-
cert with one another”.29  And when it comes to the phenomenon of
memory, to deny design would be to deny memory itself; even the ety-
mology of the word itself reveals that to re-member or to re-group or to
re-gather is necessarily concerned with achieving unity for the purpose of
survival, but not the kind of survival that implies “chance mutations, driven
blindly by the engine of natural selection”,30 but the kind that implies an
intelligent and willed striving for courage and hope in the face of the
supreme mystery, namely, death. With this, we have come to the utmost
meaning of all we have been considering: philosophy, healing, what it
means to be human.  It was for a good reason that Plato said "all philoso-
phy is but a meditation on death”.  The great philosopher/doctors of old
emphasized that it was this, above all, that set human beings apart from
the higher animals, and I suppose we would have to add today, above
super-computers.  A meditation upon death brought the lover of wisdom,
the philosopher, to the see that although death could only be postponed,
and not overcome, life was still worth living.  To heal the patient meant,
above all, to help the patient realize this timeless truth, and the memory of
this truth was said to live on in the really genuine healers.  The physicians
who were able to preserve this truth and hand it on to their patients, were
the ones considered to be philosophers, lovers of wisdom. It seems fitting
then, to bring this very modest meditation on an enormous topic to a
close with a quote from a sixth century philosopher by the name of
Boethius, who towards the end of his life, as he was facing his own death,
penned the following words to describe his own ultimate healing:

The Clouds of my grief
finally dissolved and I drank in the light

With my thoughts recollected
I turned to examine the face of my physician.

I turned my eyes and fixed my gaze upon her, and
I saw that it was my nurse in whose house

I had been cared for since my youth__the house of philosophy.



35

Endnotes

1This key note address was given at the 12th Annual Chicago Trauma Sym-
posium/www.chicagotraumasymposium.com
on August 5th, 2010

2See Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1991) 6.

3I refer here to the discovery of the structure of a part of the human cell
called deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA, by Francis Crick and James
Watson.  It was revolutionary in that it provided “an intellectual framework for un-
derstanding how information from the genes controls the functioning of the cell.
That discovery led to a basic understanding of how genes are regulated, how they
give rise to the proteins that determine the functions of cells, and how development
turns genes and proteins on and off to determine the body plan of an organism”.  See
Eric R. Kandel’s In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006) xi.

4Kandel, In Search of Memory, 11.
5Werner Heisenberg, “Natural Law and the Structure of Matter, in Across

Frontiers (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) 104.
6Ibid., 115. (my emphasis in italics)
7For the full argument see my “Soul Matters: Apes, Anthropology, and

Aristotle” in Transdisciplinarity In Science and Religion ed. Eric Weislogel
(Bucharest: Curtea Veche Publishing House, 2009) 197-234.  Also available on-line
at www.metanexus.net under “conferences, 2008”.

8See Pierre Hadot’s The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of
Nature (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006) 19. In some
ways, I have taken this quote out of context because part of what Hippocrates is
resisting here is the influence of certain kinds of philosophy upon medicine. How-
ever, I do maintain that the thrust of what I am trying to argue here is warranted.

9See Bioethics in Central Europe ed. Vasil Gluchman (Slovakia: Filozoficka
fakulta PU v Presove, 2009).  The title is somewhat misleading, as many of these
conference proceedings are not limited to analyzing the situation of bioethics only in
Central Europe, but have a global perspective.

10In  Search of Memory, 10.
11Ibid., 11.
12See Richard Khuri’s “Values and Science:  A Philosophical Examination

of Values Suggested by Recent Developments within the Sciences”__a presentation
given at an international conference in Venice, 2010.  Soon to be published by. . .

13In Search of Memory, xii.
14Ibid., 9.
15Ibid., xii.
16Ibid.
17For a full treatment of what exactly is meant by “substantial form” in the

modern context of the biological revolution, see my Soul Matters: Apes, Anthropol-
ogy, and Aristotle” in Transdisciplinarity In Science and Religion ed. Eric Weislogel
(Bucharest: Curtea Veche Publishing House, 2009) 197-234.  Also available on-line



36

at www.metanexus.net under “conferences, 2008”.
18In Search of Memory, xiii.
19Ibid.
20“Credit for the concept of a molecular clock is given to Emile Zuckerkandal

and double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling. They are supposed to have been the
first to realize that because mutations are random events DNA should accumulate
them at a relatively steady rate”. See John Gribbin’s and Jeremy Cherfas’ The First
Chimpanzee: In Search of Human Origins (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001) 114.

21Ibid., 23, 114, 125, 129.
22Ibid., 1-3.
23Ibid., 1.
24See W. W. Gibb’s “The unseen genome: gems among the junk” in Scien-

tific American, (2003) 289 (5): 46-53.
25Anaximander, the student of a certain Thales who is known as the Father

of Philosophy in the West, composed a long poem On Nature wherein he suggests
that plants and animals evolved from mud and that humans evolved from fish.

26This is how Kandel puts it: see In Search of Memory, 8.
27Ibid., 8
28Ibid., 9
29See Thomas B. Fowler’s and Daniel Kuebler’s The Evolution Controversy

(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007) 237.
30Ibid.