Happy Birthday, Gene Roddenberry!
Today marks two important and very different birthdays: one in a somewhat obscure corner of philosophy, and one at the forefront of popular entertainment. Two people who couldn’t have been more different from each other. An Oxford don and an American pilot, TV writer and movie producer. Gilbert Ryle and Gene Roddenberry. And since we’re talking about Roddenberry, let’s also mention Commander Riker, whose fictional birthday is actually the same as the birthday of the actor who played him: Jonathan Frakes. Both too were born on August 19, and both wouldn’t be what we know them as, were it not for Roddenberry.
But let’s start with Ryle. Gilbert Ryle was born in 1900, the son of a doctor with interests in philosophy and astronomy. He studied in Oxford and became a lecturer in philosophy in 1925. He published his main work, The Concept of Mind, in 1949.
Ryle had many interests and is somewhat difficult to put into a neatly labelled drawer. One thing he did was oppose Cartesian dualism.
Cartesian dualism
What does this mean?
It has to do with how many fundamentally different kinds of things one assumes to be in the world. There are chairs, cars and apples, of course. But, in the end, these are all of the same kind: material things. They have a length, a height and a weight. One can drop them and break them.
But not all things are material. We have thoughts, for instance. Thoughts don’t seem to have a length or a weight. People don’t get any heavier if they are thoughtful, nor is not-thinking an effective way to lose weight. Rene Descartes (who is the man behind ‘Cartesian’ philosophy and also the starting point of all modern thought, 1596–1650) accordingly thought that there are two fundamentally different substances in the world: on the one hand, material things, like chairs and apples. And on the other, thoughts. Mental processes, he said, must be different from matter, because obviously thoughts don’t have a length, or a weight.
This general idea is called ‘dualism,’ because it divides the world into two (Latin: duo) fundamental kinds of things. It is also familiar to us from Christian religion, which assumes that a human being is composed of both a material part, a body, and an immaterial part, a soul. The soul is what ‘thinks,’ and it is thought to survive the death of the body and go to heaven or hell.
This kind of thought was common long before Descartes, and even before Christianity. Plato already distinguishes between a (higher, purer) world of ideas, and a (lower, dirtier, less perfect) world of things. For Plato, things are just the imperfect ‘copies’ of the ideas. This is also a dualist approach.
Behaviourism
Ryle is one of the many philosophers who disagreed. He thought that seeing thoughts as ‘immaterial things’ is wrong. Instead, one can always translate a statement about thoughts into a description of a behaviour that is equivalent to these mental processes. A belief (for instance, that one is rich), will lead to a series of behaviours expressing richness: buying a car, renting a big house, and so on. A mental state like fear will lead to behaviours like running away from the feared thing, screaming, calling for help, and so on. Love leads to entirely different behaviours. In fact, one cannot well distinguish the mental state itself from the associated behaviour: What is the meaning of saying that one feels love for another person P, if this does not lead to particular (‘love-appropriate’) behaviours towards P? Is there at all something that is the mental state of love (or fear, or any other mental state) and that is not expressed in suitable behaviour? The doctrine that mental states are nothing but the behaviours that express them, is called behaviourism.
In the end, Ryle disputed that there are particular ‘things’ that philosophers are dealing with. Medicine deals with illnesses, atomic physics with atoms, and oceanography with oceans. It is tempting to think of philosophy of being just another science like that, a science that deals with thoughts, concepts, arguments: ‘things’ of the mind. Ryle disagreed. He thought that philosophy is a particular way of examining just the same things that make up our everyday reality.
Philosophy as map-making
In a famous analogy, he described philosophy as cartography, the science of making maps. The villager who has a knowledge of his village and the cartographer who draws up a map of the village don’t have different subjects: they both examine the village. But the villager has a personal, historical approach to it. This house is John’s house, this is the blacksmith’s, this is the doctor’s. The cartographer, in contrast, describes the village in more abstract terms: as streets, directions, elevations: in the same terms as he would describe every other village. In this way, he seeks a more general description of the same village. The object of his study is not a different object; it is just described differently.
Gene Roddenberry
The movie man Roddenberry started out as a bomber pilot in the second World War. From there he went into civil aviation and crashed his plane a few times, which seemingly motivated him to become an airplane crash investigator. Later he left flying to become a policeman, and soon he found himself the Police Chief’s speech writer. He went on to become a TV writer in parallel to his life as a police officer, until finally, in 1956, he left the force to become a full-time writer.
Roddenberry was famously a supporter of multiculturalism. In real life, he was fired from a series set in 1860’s Mississippi, after he discovered (and opposed) that the producers didn’t want any black people on the show. Multiple of his early shows and concepts were about the coexistence and cooperation between black and white people. He was also behind the first famous interracial kiss on US television between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek.
From the 60s all the way to the mid-90s, what distinguished Roddenberry’s Star Trek from other TV shows was its relentless optimism about the future. Mankind would unite, finally. Men would put aside their differences and work together to create a better, wiser, calmer, more enlightened world. Wars and diseases would be no more than bad memories of a distant past. Exploration would be done with a sense of wonder and respect, and wouldn’t become exploitation, as it so often did in real human history. While other science fiction works of the time dealt with the ecological destruction of the planet, the rise of evil AI or interplanetary warfare, Star Trek, under Roddenberry’s influence, was always a place where the an elite caste of philosophers ruled a universe that became better and better.
Especially today, where the world seems to be increasingly governed by men who are either out of their minds, or criminals, or both, Roddenberry’s vision stays up there in our collective mind as a promise, a duty, a fairy tale, a lullaby: a place to dream of, a place to yearn for, a place to work towards, a place that everyone would be proud and glad to call home.
Originally published at daily-philosophy.com on August 19, 2018.
