In the original essay, Sellars proposes that one fundamental source of intellectual problems is the tension between two rival "images" of humankind: the "manifest image" is the more primordial insofar as it depicts humans as people who live in societies, participate in social roles, have duties to each other, and so forth; on the other hand, the "scientific image" depicts humans as meat machines that are really compositions of smaller parts driven by basic scientific laws. Since each image pretends to be complete, each image establishes itself as the rival of the other: whereas the manifest image historically preceded the scientific image and so has some claim to methodological and conceptual priority, the latter proposes an entirely new system of categories and concepts that describe entities that have genetic or causal priority to the entities depicted in the manifest image. Sellars contends that if there is a special discipline called 'philosophy', then one of its basic goals must be to bring these two images together in a synoptic, stereoptic vision of humankind that gives a degree of three dimensional depth to each image of humankind that neither has on its own.
One of the things that interests me so much about medicine, and especially medical ethics, is that medical professionals have to see their patients from within each image. When a doctor enters a room to meet a patient for the first time, he interacts with the patient from within the manifest image: he participates in a certain social role, he treats the patient as a person by addressing the patient in a second-person form, he inquires about the patient's illness, and so on. But when the doctor's task turns to querying impersonal symptoms of an abstract disease process by performing a physical exam, taking samples, and ordering laboratory tests, the doctor sees the patient from within the scientific image. Nowhere else, it seems to me, are these two images put into such close proximity as in medical practice, and therefore medical practice is not only the most obvious place to look for a perspective from which to catch sight of the synoptic vision of humankind but also the place where such vision is most direly needed, since the rivalry between these images is so pronounced when it comes to ethics.
Now, outside of medicine, many thinkers have argued that one image of humankind is more basic or primordial than the other. For instance, Sellars' previously mentioned student, Sebastian "Bas" Van Fraassen argues in The Scientific Image that the manifest image is prior and independent of the scientific image, which is simply a construct within the manifest image. By contrast, another of Sellars' students, Paul Churchland argues that we should dispense with the manifest image entirely (except, perhaps, for practical matters) because it has so colored our vision of the world that it distorts our self-understanding. In an orthogonal approach, Michel Foucault argues in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception that these images must be understood through their historical development in medical practice. Each in their own way, Van Fraassen, Churchland, and Foucault argue that a synoptic, stereoptic vision of humankind is impossible: to put it simplistically, either each image overshadows the other, or we can only see each vision serially, but never at the same time.
But for the purposes of actual medical practice, (and here I'm doing some damage to these authors' views), none of these simplistic options will do; a synoptic view is necessary, if for nothing else than to mitigate competing tensions within the medical profession. Currently, medical professionals are pushed toward "patient centered" medicine which puts the manifest image front and center, at the same time that they are pulled in the other direction to practice "evidence-based" medicine, which emphasizes the scientific image. Such professional tensions, I submit, can only be resolved from the perspective of a synoptic view, not one alone.
Despite all this, the image that currently dominates medicine is undoubtedly the scientific image, and it's from within the concerns of this image that I think any investigation must begin. Hence the name of my newly christened blog.
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