Customer Reviews

The Analysis of Mind

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Formally this book doesn't contain groundbreaking insights, or better: it doesn't say anything that isn't already under your eyes. Its biggest accomplishment, however, is in the very act of showing how sometimes we don't see what's under our eyes for a sort of mental laziness.

Russell forces us to move away from this laziness and reconsider what we take for granted about ourselves, and does so with his enjoyable style. He seems to possess the rare skill of finding the minimum amount of words and concepts needed to explain (and solve) the problem clearly and accurately. He will never forget to define precisely all the terms needed in the discussion, or to question the limits of the premises in order to understand the scope of the conclusion.

In each chapter he considers a facet of what we call mind and explores it both from the point of introspection and of external analysis of observable behavior. Introspection gives use informations impossible to obtain with other methods, and it is what gives meaning to the problem of mind in the first place, but it has the intrinsic problem of an instrument trying to measure itself. So Russell keeps on correcting this "view from the inside" and the delusions it can create with the stick of behaviourism and objective observation.

On a less technical side, I highly appreciate the intellectual honesty of someone who can freely use the words "contrary to what I once stated".

The only minus I can think of is that after one has understood the method of analysis employed he can probably predict how it will be used by the author to investigate the remaining items of his enquiry. While I was reading the second half of the book I often found myself anticipating his reasoning, and thinking that those last chapters could have been thinner. However the author's highly readable prose makes this a very small problem, and I suggest this book to everyone interested in the subject (anyone should be!)

[A NOTE ABOUT BOOK READABILITY: Amazon merged on the same page the reviews for the paperback and the ebook, so please notice that the review below which warns you about the unreadable format of the book refers ONLY to the kindle version. If you are interested in the paperback edition you should disregard that warning. I don't remember finding any problem in readability in the book, but since the "Look inside!" feature is available you can check for yourself if the format is acceptable to you.)

The format for this book is just about unreadable with serveral lines of open space between sentences.

This set of fifteen lectures delivered in 1921 and available on line at the Pennsylvania State University, are important but have aged tremendously. Today we can follow in real time the activity of the brain and nervous system for any mental activity, or motor activity as for that. So a great number of pages discussing the difference between a sensation, purely at the level of the contact of some sensorial organ with an outside stimulus, and an image which is a mental representation of what the stimuli are bringing in, or of some mnemic, in other words remembered or recollected, representation in the mind can clearly be solved. Thinking of something or seeing something are very similar but different, just as doing something and seeing someone doing something are very similar but not exactly the same thanks to mirror neurons. And we can "see" the brain working today.

In the same way he spends a tremendous amount of time demonstrating the existence of the mind, of a specific mental level of brain activity. But today that is no longer something to be discussed in such length because thanks to the tremendous progress of medical imagery we know that the brain can work without any outside stimulus, on a stimulus that comes directly from inside, thought, recollection, imagination and so on. But Buddhism is more advanced on the subject than that because they consider that there are six senses in man: the five sensorial senses we know that receive the stimuli from outside and the mind that processes these stimulated sensations to analyze them, recognize them, classify them, identify them, etc, but also, because it is a meta-sense, the possibility to do the same with abstract notions that cannot be at the origin of a physical sensorial stimulus, and of course all other mental or brain element that activates the brain, because the brain can work on its own like an autonomous or semi-autonomous organ (dreams, abstract or artistic activities, etc.).

He thus would have been able to come to a clearer notion of knowledge, something that is acquired and accumulated by a subject within some conditions and a context, most of the time collective. But strangely enough Russell neglects, if not rejects, the subject as an essential entity. The learner, the speaker, the hearer, the individual that receives the stimuli through his/her senses and then processes them, the individual that acquires some knowledge through a threshold of the acquisition of knowledge that is his or her own with motivation(s), cognitive strategies and cognitive styles, with the desire to learn or the refusal to learn. These mental dimensions are all motivated by the context of the subject and his own experience, and his experiential history.

That's the word that is missing essentially: experience.

If we consider the individual in his experience of the world in which he has five physical senses and the mind, a meta-sense in the brain, that receives experiential stimuli all the time in a situation where he has to learn to become autonomous when a new born and independent when autonomous, if we take the individual in that context he is not an abstract subject but he is an experiencer. If we taker language he is a hearer or a speaker, eventually a writer but when Russell brings together hearing, speaking writing or reading, there is something wrong in his vision of language. Writing and reading are the results of a late invention in the phylogeny of language in humanity, and a late learning in children, and has little to do with oral language. We do not speak what we write first, but we speak first and we eventually write what we have spoken or what we are thinking with our mental voice.

He would have then enriched his vision with that set of concepts he does not use. Matter the way it is defined by physics is a construct but that does not in anyway permit anyone to say that matter is a mental imaginary entity. Matter is what is outside us and it does not need to be seen, heard, touched or whatever to exist. We can only experience this material world through our senses in a situation of extreme need and feebleness for several years. There is no escaping that. And it is this extreme inferiority that forces humanity as a whole and each child to communicate, hence to learn a language, hence to learn a lot of things and increase their mental powers. Then the rest is social and no longer individual. If the new-born was to be an absolutely individual being it would not survive twelve hours. That social dimension of the mind is not taken into account properly, neither phylogenetically for the human species with the emergence of modern man and homo sapiens, not psychogenetically for each new-born.

"All psychic phenomena are built up out of sensations and images alone." That's a good conclusion but tremendously short of the real situation. The very first experience of a new-born and even of a foetus over 24 weeks are going to be engraved in the brain and mind of that new-born and will build all his attitudes, motivations or de-motivations, learning experiences or learning refusals during his whole life. Then sensations and the mental representations a person may have in his mind going back to the first three to five years of his/her life are a lot more than just plain sensations, mnemic sensations, images, mnemic images, or whatever. They are most of the time unconscious and embedded in the brain at a very physical level, even in the architectures of the dendrites of the neurons that have grown along with this experience.

I will not comment on what he says on language. He had not read de Saussure, that's obvious but today we are far beyond his very naïve definition of the word as if Semitic languages, isolating languages and agglutinative, synthetic or syntactically analytical languages could have the same definition of a word, which are in fact roots in Semitic languages, frozen categorized parts of speech (very badly called like that) in isolating languages, and fully syntactic words in all other languages with different levels of realization of the syntax on the word (agglutinative) or around the word (the others). Paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions are essential for the various basic elements of our articulated languages, an other word, articulation, that is never used. Our languages have three articulations and we cannot economize on these facts.

An important set of lectures though more for the historical approach of the :mind in out western society. We must also keep in mind that many languages do not have a word equivalent to "mind" in Europe and the West because "mind" is typically English and other languages have given some Christian or religious values to the words they may use to designate the physical and psychological dimension of the brain's functioning.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This is a book of psychology. For someone looking for a philosophy it is almost unreadable. I would say skip and go to other Russell's philosophical works.

Why is it that page numbers are so often left off when a book is converted to electronic format? Page numbers help people to have conversations about books-you know the old dictum "Are we on the same page?". If one intends to use a book like this for academic purposes, it is impossible without page numbers.

As far as the other formatting errors suggested below, none appear when reading via the Kindle software for Mac.

The book is very bad printed. There are numerous mistakes and overall it results very painfull to see, not to say, read it. It is a shame that one buy a book and there is no way to make a complain about its printing quality. That is the reason I am doing this here as a review. I will appreciate if you send me another, good copy of Analysis of Mind. If you want I can send you back the copy I received.