When an explanation makes a fact intelligible, the mystery goes out of it. We understand it so well that we can hardly conceive of things being otherwise. Consider the simple mathematical fact that one plus one equals two. Once we understand elementary arithmetic, we no longer feel the urge to ask why one plus one equals two. That one plus one equals two strikes us as not merely true but unavoidable; we cannot even coherently imagine its falsity. Much of philosophy aims to bring other fundamental features of reality into a similar light, to make them appear not arbitrary but inevitable and, thus, intelligible.
This aspiration that philosophy render the world intelligible is best expressed by the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. According to Leibniz: ‘we can find no true or existent fact … without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise.’ And, as Spinoza wrote: ‘For each thing there must be assigned a cause or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence.’ What’s being expressed here, in the words of the US philosopher Michael Della Rocca, is the desire ‘to make the world and our place in it intelligible’. To grasp the kinds of reasons or explanations sought by Leibniz and Spinoza ‘is the perennial hope and promise of philosophy’.
The demand for intelligibility can lead to some extraordinary places. For Leibniz, the demand led him to propose that reality is ultimately made up of a multiplicity of monads: indivisible, infinitesimally small units of substance, each of which is a causally isolated, self-contained universe. Spinoza’s resolute commitment to universal intelligibility led him to conclude that reality is, instead, a single infinite substance that he called God or nature. As we will see, the demand for intelligibility can also lead into the strange and fascinating world of panpsychism.
Panpsychism is an increasingly popular view about consciousness. You are conscious, you feel pleasures, pains and all manner of other experiences. At every waking moment, and even when you dream, there is something that it is like to be you. The same goes for other humans and animals, and this accounts for moral status: thumping a fist on a desk in frustration is morally permissible in a way that hitting a conscious person or animal is not. Desks, chairs, rocks and so on are not conscious – and are therefore without moral status – whereas humans, bonobos, dogs and so on are conscious, and deserving of at least some moral recognition. But panpsychism rejects this division into conscious and non-conscious things. It is the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, so everything from electrons and protons to tables and planets, and, of course, humans and dogs, has consciousness to some degree.
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