The father I never had turned out to be an old High School friend of Rodney's, Laird Tennant. He was the father of us all just by sheer force of personality. He had an apartment on the far side of Boylston, just up the block and down an incline from where Don Davis had died. He and his wife, Lucy, were opposites, he a bear of a guy and she a wisp of a thing. As intellectuals, they were both giants.
I met Laird for the first time up at Xenia and Rodney's. (They'd moved. They moved around the orbit quite a bit, since they traveled. New York, France, the dreaded Midwest, the great Southwest, hither, yon they went, gypsies never far from their steamer trunk of costumes and practice clothes. They had to rent new dwellings repeatedly.) The new apartment had a big dining room and Laird approved of this. They'd "engineer tostadas" and he'd hold forth. I can't forget, nor can I leave out of my tale, that fabulous introduction to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle that made me want to kill Laird dead on the spot. Reader, you be the judge. See if you can suffer the following explication of the well-known work of mind-body philosophy without becoming irritated by the draconian pedagogical method. There's going to be a quiz at the end so I'd advise taking some notes.
I:
"I have in mind some very copacetic tunes." (Van Dyke had salted my lingo.)
He:
"You have in mind."
"Yes. That's what I said. I have in mind..."
"In what?"
"What?"
In the kitchen, Rodney is wincing. He's been down this bumpy road before.
"You have in what?"
"I was thinking..."
"You said, 'in mind.'"
"I said...'in mind.' Yes."
"Where is that?"
"Where is what?"
"Your mind."
"Where is my mind?"
"Yes. Where do you think that?"
"I think I think it in my head."
He's got a whinnying snicker of a laugh. He snorts with derision. He goes right on:
"In your head. You mean, if I cut open your head, I'll see your mind in which I'll find 'tunes?'"
"No. If you, god forbid, cut open my head you'll find my brain."
"And that's the location of your mind?"
"Yes."
I get, now, that instead of being allowed to program the turntable with my new-found love of jazz classics, I am instead taking a philosophy course. I believe that I've trumped it, but I am dead wrong. He:
"Your mind is in your brain?"
"Right. Mind in brain."
"How do you KNOW that?"
"I think neuroscience teaches..."
"You think. You think that's what happens in your mind; thinking, and you think your mind is in your brain."
"Yes."
"I'm asking you to tell me where you think that."
"I just told you. I think in my brain."
"I cut open your brain..."
"...again with the threats of surgery!"
"...and I see thinking going on?"
"No, you'll see a lot of blood and grey matter. The thinking is going on as neurons fire..."
"So I'll be seeing these neurons firing and that will be you thinking, that will be where what you 'have in mind' resides?"
"You will not be able to see the neurons. That may be an analogy."
"So it all turns out to be just you thinking that that's where you think that."
"No, I think..."
"But WHERE do you think that?"
"I think you're on a loop."
"Where do you think it?"
"Do you mind?"
"Where's your mind?"
Tapping my head I say, with some exasperation:
"Mine's up here. Where's yours?"
From the kitchen:
"Tennant lost his in college."
That's Rod speaking, but in the background, Xenia's giggling. Laird Tennant is also cackling, but his finger is still wagging in the midair above his head, indicating his desire to continue.
"I have in a way lost my mind!"
"Aha! I knew it!"
"I have lost my certainty of the "concept of mind...."
I'm hearing Ryle's title for the first time, so it doesn't register, other than as another irritating trope.
"I can not say that I can pin down its location. It is, as you suggested about the neuroscience of brain tissue, an abstraction."
"My word was 'analogy'..."
"...be that as it may, you can't tell me where you think anything. It may be that the concept is a misnomer. It may be, as Ryle suggests, that 'the ghost in the machine' is an artificial construct."
From Rod in the kitchen:
"That's what Ryle says?"
Me:
"Who's Ryle?"
Rod:
"Gilbert Ryle. He wrote 'The Concept of Mind.'"
Laird:
"...an artificial construct that is not necessarily peering out of our eyes at the world, but floating free, free at least in concept, free to be expanded infinitely, free to do so many things that only a concept, or construct, can do..."
He's almost singing this, speaking like a crazed professor. In my naivete, I did not get the connection between a free consciousness as a concept and psychedelic drugs. I knew of neither mind-body philosophy nor hallucinogens. This would change, but for the moment I had no choice but to let this colossal misunderstanding of the signature work of Gilbert Ryle, (1900-1976), stand. From the kitchen, Rod:
"Free to alter the weather?"
Huge cackling laughter, rising in pitch from tenor to contralto, from Tennant, who has won again at word chess.
"Yes! Free to float in the atmosphere and seed the clouds!"
"Free to change the channel?"
"Indeed, we can change the channel."
"Are you, sirs and mesdames free for dinner?"
"Yes we're free!"
"Good, because dinner is served."
I:
"I have just one question before we all sit down."
Xenia:
"Yes, Cal."
"May I, at long last, take my 'wherever I think that' over to the stereo and replace this "Weather Report" and put on "Bitch's Brew?"
"Not a fan of Shorter?"
"Not."
As we pull up chairs and sit, I ask:
"So," (nodding at the large form of Laird Tennant, messily devouring a taco), "what did he study in college?"
"Philosophy."
"Natch. What's he do for a living?"
"Sells books."
"Got a copy of 'The Concept of Mind?'"
Tennant's nodding, dabbing at his face with a napkin.
"Sure sure. I'll lend it to you."
'Wherever I think that' became a catch phrase for a while, but for those of you awaiting the test, a quick peek at the "Concept of Mind" reveals that Ryle may himself have concocted that irritating dialogue about 'where' this or that was, especially when referring to overarching concepts not located in a physical place. His perhaps truculent behaviorism picks away at the model in which 'thinking' is equated to 'being.' The question is, did Ryle really 'think' (wherever and however he did it) any of this stuff about the power of the mind to alter events? It's complicated, but the simple answer is 'of course not!' That sort of nonsense was espoused by Tim Leary and L. Ron Hubbard. In fact, my initial position that 'mind' was an element for neuroscience to work out is very close to Ryle's own conclusion. The drugs, such as LSD, work because of the mechanisms of brain chemistry. All of that other speculation is very much outside Ryle's philosophical area. It is also speculation, pure and simple with little factual grounding. Tennant jumped out of one misapprehension of a metaphor and landed in another. It was late in the school year that wrapped in 1975 that I met Laird Tennant. Ryle died in October of 1976. I always felt, that by constantly evoking his philosophy in such a wrongheaded way, as we beamed our expanded consciousnesses into the ether , we very likely killed Ryle with our minds.
