Kaveh Behbahani's essay 'Boxes of the Mind'

The book Mind and Everything: Schemas for Living, written by Maghsoud Farasatkhah, Kargadan Publishing, 2017, is an amalgam of various disciplines: philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, sociology, social psychology, neuroscience, and other sciences. The book aims to prepare the human mind to become more skillful in the art of living. The author considers the good life ("well-being") to be "ultimately a subjective and agential matter" (p. 48) and the transformation of the mind to be the royal road to transforming the quality of life: our prudence is our destiny. It was Kant who, in an intellectual upheaval he himself called the Copernican Revolution, consigned the crude and unrefined realism that preceded him to the dustbin of intellectual history. The human mind is an active player, tailoring the external world to its own measure; it is not the case that it merely shows us the world as it is, without addition or subtraction.

"It is the mind that transforms the 'world-in-itself' into a 'world-for-us.' The world is formless, and it is our mind that gives it form" (p. 55). Kant's revolution gradually became more radical, arriving at the point where the human mind constructs categories and projects them onto existence (the approach known as constructivism). One can employ the metaphor of "boxes of the mind." Our mind, with the aid of a handful of boxes (or, in the accepted terminology of the author of Mind and Everything, a handful of mental constructs, or schemas), looks at itself and at the world, and "the root of matters lies in our self-conceptions and mental constructs" (22), and also "the realm of our possibilities is contingent upon our mental state," and our mental state is contingent upon the boxes or mental schemas through which we view the world. Of course, constructs and schemas can be changed, and one can view the world with newer concepts and interpretations, but a boxless mind, an empty and passive mind, a mind that apprehends the world without any interpretation, is a naive fantasy.[1]

The human being is an interpreting animal, and his interpretations (his mental boxes with which he interprets) shape his world. This very idea is one of the fundamental presuppositions of the book. To distance himself from theological and opium-induced conceptions of the mind, the author defends a specific theory in the philosophy of mind: a kind of physicalist theory, belonging to the contemporary American philosopher John Searle, which regards the mind as an emergent property of the brain. It is this naturalistic understanding of the mind that leads the author to repeatedly draw upon the findings of modern neuroscience and, in his own words, to deliver a “realistic understanding of the mind” rather than a romantic and fanciful one—and of course, this naturalism does not lead the author to the mistaken notion that human beings are entirely without need of spiritual schemas. Now that there is no escape from mental constructs, recognizing these constructs, revising them, and replacing them when they prove ineffective is an option before us. The author explores four schemas for living and offers suggestions for revising them: The first mental schema or box is the schema of happiness and pleasure: “Our mind can see life as a design of pleasure . . . which happens to be a good model for living.” (p. 147). And of course, if our mental construct is that life is entirely an experience of pleasure, the author draws our attention to “the tragic nature of life.” He is, in his own words, in search of “a noble tragic realism” “that tells us suffering is an inseparable part of our existence in this world.” (p. 161) And then, he goes on to tell us how one can befriend human sorrow and grief and draw help from them: sorrow, grief, and pain make a person deeper and more profound in thought, just as the cage makes the nightingale’s song sweeter and more melodious. Although the author considers the mind to be everything, he is not unaware of the social dimensions of happiness (cf. p. 171). While aware of the social factors affecting human happiness, he outlines a dilemma that could be called the “dilemma of happiness”: when social institutions and structures in a given society seek not to promote happiness but to deny people a happy life, preferring “the frowning asceticism” and “the hungover countenance” to “the good-natured dregs-drinkers” and wanting people to be bitter and ill-tempered, two paths lie before the individual: people can wait for a miracle to change external conditions and neglect their inner capacities for living joyfully (in which case, of course, their state will not improve, and they will have vainly pinned their hopes on a miracle), or they can trample sorrow with the foot of vitality and “return to their existential anchors” (p. 172). The author writes:

“Although the social dimension of happiness underpins the individual dimension of well-being, when a society is afflicted with sorrow, hope lies only in the welling up of joy from the gazes, resolves, and endeavors of the individuals within that society . . . To change these [social] institutions and systems, individuals must engage in a kind of human, epistemic, moral, and cultural resistance at the existential level, and they need this inner joy.” (p. 172)

Another mental box the author discusses is the schema of profit and benefit: the human inclination toward gain and avoidance of loss. The author revises our conventional schemas in this regard and proposes alternative schemas, asking us, for example, to replace the construct of “profit maximization” with “profit optimization.” Or he recommends that instead of “immediate profit,” we pursue “future profit,” and finally, he speaks of the limitations of the profit schema. The third mental box is the schema of who-one-is, or identity. The human being, in the words of the contemporary Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is a “storytelling animal,” and identity is the story or stories that a person holds in his mind about himself to explain who he is. In this section, the author discusses various dimensions of identity and, in agreement with his other book We Iranians: A Historical and Social Contextual Analysis of Iranian Ethos (Ney Publishing, 2015), asks, “How does the Iranian mind perceive its national identity?” (p. 204)

Finally, the author speaks of spiritual schemas for living a good life. His view in this section somewhat resembles that of the American epistemologist Linda Zagzebski: an invitation to a kind of risk-taking in order to attain a truth that may be necessary for human well-being, and also to escape the conservative grip of agnosticism (or 'not-knowing-ism').[2] (See p. 239 of the book Mind and Everything). But the author does not consider religious spirituality to be the only form of spirituality; rather, in his belief, one can have a secular conception of spirituality and speak of a kind of "spiritual intelligence" (p. 228). In his view, "meaning is in fact a perceptual, neural, psychological, social, and cultural structure. A kind of perceptual pattern that the mind constructs." (p. 219) The book concludes by examining the various aspects of the mind's spiritual construct and investigating the effects and outcomes of spirituality in life.

Ultimately, it must be said that the book is a readable work that, drawing on the latest findings from various branches of human knowledge, invites the reader to reconsider and revise the familiar and accustomed constructs and boxes of their mind. Constructs through which the human mind is addicted to viewing the world. Through a kind of second-order cognition (or metacognition), the book asks its audience to adjust their mental schemas in a way that opens the path to happiness and well-being.

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[1] Here, when we say schema, we do not mean its specialized sense (for instance, in Kant or in the work of the American psychologist Jeffrey Young), but rather we mean, in general, any structure by which the human mind understands the world. The contemporary American philosopher of mind, Patrick Grim, uses an example to help us grasp this idea: he says, read the following poem: "Newspaper is better than book pages/ The seashore is better than a busy street/ Don't run at first, walk/ You will learn quickly/ Open space is necessary/ When it rains, things get ruined/ If it's gone, it's gone." Grim says, read this poem and think about it. Then he says, these lines were not actually a poem but sentences describing and instructing how to work a kite: do you see how, by changing the mental box you have cast over the words, your understanding and perception of them changes?

[2] To become acquainted with Zagzebski's view, see Epistemology, Linda Zagzebski, translated by Kaveh Behbahani, Nashr-e Ney, third edition 1397, pp. 31-40

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Boxes of the Mind

A Look at the Book Mind and Everything: Schemas for Living

Author of the piece: Kaveh Behbahani

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PDF file of this article in the Monthly Journal of Communication Management, 112, Shahrivar 98

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Bibliographic Information

Title: Mind and Everything: Schemas for Living

Author: Maghsoud Farasatkhah

Publisher: Kargadan

Number of Pages: 304

Year of Publication: Second Edition 1396