Introduction
“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” is a semi-biographical story by Dr. Oliver Sacks in which he narrates the story of Dr. P who seems to suffer from a condition known as visual agnosia.
Dr. P's Visual Agnosia
Dr. P visits an ophthalmologist after several instances of visual misappropriations but the doctor is convinced that he may be having a neurological condition, not a visual problem. When he develops diabetes, Dr. P is convinced that it is one of the factors to his visual problems. A talented musician, Dr. P seems to have lost most of his ability to read music but not the ability to still listen and play music. He also loses the visual ability to make sense of whole concept. This loss of vision leads him to try to pick his wife’s head to wear as a hat after a doctor’s visit. Throughout the story, Sacks explains his struggle to try to help him but eventually settles on helping him to stick to the sense in which he is most comfortable – his ability to interpret music. The story is a highlight of Sack’s fascination with the functioning of various parts of the brain. In Dr. P’s case, Dr. Oliver Sacks proves that not all neurological problems are treatable. The reader is brought to the intersection of understanding the condition and the personality of the patient. The central argument in this case is that not all neurological disorders can reduce the ability of an individual to think in categorical and abstract ways (Dasgupta 2014). As such, defining physicalism cannot occur without the existence of subjective realism.
The Personality of Dr. P
Oliver Sacks begins this story by describing the most significant aspect of his patient’s personality. The fact that he was a musician with distinction implies that Dr. P was a passionate individual. Understanding this aspect creates an avenue to understand his personality as an individual. It implies that before developing agnosia, Dr. P was an individual whose senses were all functional. He could recognize the people around him, and everything was fundamentally mental as he could create abstract recognitions of his surroundings. However, as he lost this sense, he became rather monistic in his thinking (Seybold 2016). For instance, he could only recognize the cartoons showed to him by Dr. Sacks when he identified particular features on them such as the cigarettes. His inability to think abstractly is seen in the way he fails to recognize the characters in the movie and the changing emotions and actions. Dr. P could hardy recognize the students who walked into the office and could only tell who it was by their voice.
The Deficiency of the Visual Realm
The deficiency of the visual realm is characterized as the loss of judgment and feeling around the visual data which lowers the concrete, real, mechanical, and personal abstractions. P functioned like a computer visually (Bouchard et al. 2012). Sacks made an analogy between his agnosia and the state of cognitive psychology and neurology. The analogy saw his brain as a computer and did not see anything real and concrete about people. The neurologist avoided the want of feeling when he withheld the diagnosis of the condition. He instead encouraged more music to strengthen the inner music of P without which he could not do any meaningful activity. He was unable to see faces but recognized people by their voices. P also saw faces where there were none. The use of music allowed P to function well in his personal and professional life. He remained unaware of his problem. Sacks chose not to disrupt P’s ignorant bliss using a diagnosis. His condition only hypothesized as degeneration or tumor of the visual cortex, he was not diagnosed. The condition advanced, but he lived and worked in normalcy to the end of his life. P had the ability to compensate for the neurological function failure; he speaks of the capacity that people have to heal the defects that occur between them and reality because of physical injury. P was immersed in the love of music which enabled him to win the devotion of his colleagues, students, and his wife. His dependence on music and smell to orient himself to the richness of the world around him displays the loving and living aspect of humanity (Bernstein et al., 2018).
Physicalism and Subjective Realism
Physicalism as a philosophical term is better understood from the context of supervenience i.e. the relationship between two sets of properties (Stoljar 2010). This implies that not all properties are typically identical to physical properties. As such, abstract concepts are only understood in the ordinary sense of the word. Therefore, physicalism cannot be understood without acknowledging the presence of the abstract (Bourget and Chalmers 2014). In Dr. P’s case, the abstract were the voices around him such as the noises from the vehicles when he stood at the window in the doctor’s office. He could relate the abstract to certain physical elements i.e. the vehicles. Likewise, he could hardly read music and only felt it when it was played. It is prudent to note that physicalists often think of the mind as a physical object in some sense and that the mind and the body are not distinctively independent objects (Bourget and Chalmers 2014). This understanding explains the fact that Dr. P could connect understand the music played on the piano and even sing along to it without having to read it.
The Intersection Between Physicalism and Subjective Realism
While it is rather apparent that Dr. P is extensively portrayed as a physicalist, it is rather specious that he did not lose all his ability to think abstractly. Subjective idealism as a philosophical aspect of psychology is one that describes the human relationship with their experience with the external world (Scott and Staubman 2013). In this theory, objects are perceived to be mere collections of sense data for those who perceive them. Subjective realism reduces all physical objects to mental properties, events, or objects and that the reality is only made of the mental objects. It is quite apparent that Dr. P seems to only make monistic recognition of things. Oliver Sacks states that “there was no persona in his sense and that there was no person within...” This assertion clearly shows that he only regarded the physical characteristics. However, subjective realism helped him in identifying people and objects by forming mental abstractions of them. For instance, his interactions with the students could help him tell them apart with their voices. In addition to that, his could recognize vehicles through the sounds they made through the experiences he had before developing agnosia. In addition to that, it is rather apparent that his ability to teach music and sing when the music was played on the keyboard was influenced by his initial experience with music and musical instruments. As such, his disorder had not entirely made him a physicalist but he still maintained some aspects of subjective realism.
Conclusion
In general, the story of Dr. P shows an allegorical warning for the science of neurology. His case juxtaposes the vital axiom of classical neurology that asserts that any brain damage can lead to a reduced ability to think abstractly or categorically. Oliver Sacks proves that physicalism cannot be understood without the aspect of subjective realism. He implies that despite the fact that Dr. P seems to have lost touch with abstraction much of his physicalism is based on the experiences he has had in his life and as such, his monistic way of thinking cannot be understood without putting into consideration the subjective aspects of the same. His ability to play music is more informed by subjective thought than with the physicality of the same. In light of this, while he remains extensively monistic in his way of thinking, he still maintains an extensive abstraction. Understanding the personality of the individual before the agnosia is a crucial part of understanding the loss of dualistic abilities and the experiences of the individual that extensively contribute to the subjective realism that is seen in play. Conclusively, “The Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat” is an important part of understanding the intersection between subjective realism and physicalism.
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