The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912 to 1989) described two pictures of ourselves in the world, the ‘manifest image’, the everyday world of persons, things, colours and reasons, and the ‘scientific image’, the world of particles, fields and processes that science postulates to explain it. He held that the scientific image has the final say about what really exists, yet that persons, reasons and intentions cannot be dropped, so that the task of philosophy is to hold both in one ‘stereoscopic’ view. He also said that the manifest image grew out of an older ‘original image’ in which everything was a person, a world close to the conscious, living world of Therapeutic Shamanism, which in this teaching modern humans have largely lost touch with.
Who was Wilfrid Sellars? #
A leading American philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1912, served in the United States Navy during the Second World War, and taught at the universities of Iowa, Minnesota and Yale before moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 1963, where he stayed until his death in 1989.1
He is best known for two works. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) attacked what he called the ‘myth of the given’, the idea that knowledge rests on bare, raw experiences that need no other knowledge to make sense of them. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, collected in his book Science, Perception and Reality (1963), set out the two images this answer is about.1
What is the manifest image? #
The world as people meet it and live in it. Sellars defined it as “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world”.2 It is the world of persons who think, feel, intend and give reasons; of tables, trees and rivers with the colours and textures they seem to have; of promises, duties and plans. It is not naive or unthinking. It has been refined over a very long time, by noticing which things go with which and correcting mistakes, but it never adds new kinds of hidden thing beyond what can be met.3
What is the scientific image? #
The world as science describes it, built up by postulating things that cannot be seen, such as atoms, molecules, electromagnetic fields and nerve impulses, in order to explain what can. Unlike the manifest image, it claims to be a complete account of what there is. In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Sellars put the claim bluntly, saying that when it comes to describing and explaining the world, “science is the measure of all things”.4
The two images clash. In the manifest image a table is solid and coloured; in the scientific image it is mostly empty space, and colour is a matter of light and nerves. A person in the manifest image is someone who thinks and chooses; in the scientific image there seem to be only cells and signals. Sellars thought the clash was real and had to be faced, not dodged.5
What was the ‘original image’? #
The picture out of which, on Sellars’s account, the manifest image itself grew. He described it as “a framework in which all the ‘objects’ are persons”, a world in which the things around us are met as persons. In his account the manifest image came about through “the gradual depersonalization” of non-person objects.6
Sellars described this change as a refinement of the original image, and he was not describing any particular people; the original image is a philosopher’s account of where our ways of thinking came from, not a piece of anthropology.
Can the two images be held together? #
That was Sellars’s hope. Even whilst giving the scientific image the last word on what exists, he held that persons cannot be explained away, because to be a person is to belong to a community that shares reasons, standards and intentions, to think of oneself and others as one of ‘us’. None of that is a fact science can find in a brain; it belongs to a different kind of talk, about what we ought to do and what we intend. His aim was a “stereoscopic vision”, joining what the sciences describe with the language of individual and community intentions, the way two eyes give one picture with depth.7
How does Sellars’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in the original image. A world in which everything is a person is close to the world of Therapeutic Shamanism, in which everything is conscious. Everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious; most Western people struggle to recognise consciousness in things that are very different to them, though at some half-conscious level many still experience their computer as temperamental or a room as having its own atmosphere.8 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons? and What is animism?
His hope of holding two images in one view also has a counterpart. In Therapeutic Shamanism, mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this are two different kinds of truth, two ways of making sense of the world, and both are needed; the trouble comes from black-and-white thinking that either takes mythos as literal fact or lets logos throw mythos out as worthless.9 Hunter-gatherers, on this account, had two realities running side by side, a sense of self and an equal sense of interconnectedness, and modern humans have fallen into one of them.10 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On the direction of travel. For Sellars the depersonalising of the world was a refinement, and the scientific image has the final say on what exists. Therapeutic Shamanism reads the change differently. Modern, ‘civilised’ humans are strongly left-brain dominant, and that dominance largely suppresses the right brain’s experience of interconnectedness, which hunter-gatherers held in balance with their sense of self; for them it was no belief or theory but a real, vivid and actual experience.11 On this reading the sense of a conscious world is not a first draft to be refined away but something modern humans have largely lost touch with. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What is the Fall?
There is a difference about truth, too. Sellars gave science the last word on describing what there is, and kept persons and values in a separate realm of reasons and intentions. In Therapeutic Shamanism mythos is not a lesser truth kept alongside the real one; it is equally true, in a different way, and the aliveness of the world is something to be met in experience, not settled by deciding which image wins.
