Neuroscience and Critique

Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn

Jan De Vos, Ed Pluth, Jan De Vos, Ed Pluth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317500230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in neuroscientific research, and an expansion beyond basic research to incorporate elements of the arts, humanities and social sciences. It has been suggested that the neurosciences will bring about major transformations in the understanding of ourselves, our culture and our society. In academia one finds debates within psychology, philosophy and literature about the implications of developments within the neurosciences, and the emerging fields of educational neuroscience, neuro-economics, and neuro-aesthetics also bear witness to a 'neurological turn' which is currently taking place.

Neuroscience and Critique

is a ground-breaking edited collection which reflects on the impact of neuroscience in contemporary social science and the humanities. It is the first book to consider possibilities for a critique of the theories, practices, and implications of contemporary neuroscience.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

PART I
Which Critique?

1
THE BRAIN: A NOSTALGIC DREAM

Some Notes on Neuroscience and the Problem of Modern Knowledge

Marc De Kesel

… I believe that everything is imagined …

(Julien Offray de La Mettrie)

Since the origins of Western thinking in Ancient Greece, science and criticism have always gone hand in hand. Plato was the first to define scientific thinking as critique – ‘κρίνειν’ (krinein) in his language: making a distinction, the distinction between what is and what is not, between real and illusionary, true and false. Since Plato it is commonsensical to say that criticism leads to science and that science is impossible without criticism. No wonder then that the explosion of critical thought in the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment was contemporaneous with the emergence of modern science.

Yet, it is in the age of the Enlightenment that the definition of science had to be adjusted because of modernity’s paradigmatic shift. Science remained critical in essence, still distinguishing true and false, but no longer what is from what is not. Science and criticism were no longer considered to know being qua being, or to have access to das Ding an sich, as Kant said. Science was not giving voice to reality as it is. From now on, science was to be considered as a construction based upon empirical experience which, as such, is unable to comprehend the ‘essence’ of the experienced things.

Was this problematic? On the contrary. By omitting the ontological pretentions it had claimed since its origin, science was no longer ‘limited from within’. ‘De-ontologized’, it gained an immense freedom and was now finally able to explore the universe limitlessly. It made modern man intervene in nature on the most minuscule level of atomic structure, as well as to visit the moon and gain knowledge about the center and origin of the universe, billions of light-years away.¹

And yet, some specific knowledge did become problematic: the knowledge of that knowledge, and more precisely, the knowledge of the subject of that knowledge. For, indeed, since modernity and its de-ontologized science, we no longer really know what precisely knowing is. We lack an insight into its ontological nature, into its being qua being. And, similarly, we lack any ontological knowledge about the being of ourselves in our capacity of being the subject of scientific knowledge.

Immanuel Kant was clear about this issue: scientific knowledge is certainly possible, but about the one who knows as well as about knowing itself, science cannot be but hypothetical. The agent that thinks – the Ich denke – is a hypothetic idea of pure reason, ‘hypothetic’ if only because it claimed knowledge about that which cannot be traced back to empirical experience (Kant, 1998, p. 246 ff). The same goes for thinking as such, or, what amounts to the same thing, for reason itself. Reason cannot be observed empirically; it can only be experienced while being practiced. It is impossible to make reason the object of experience or empirical observation. Which is why, Kant concludes, reason definitely cannot be the object of scientific knowledge.

Is this a problem for Kant? It is first of all a strange thing, as he notices. For the Enlightenment, with its explosive critical thought and its new – Newtonian – physical science, is entirely the result of a thinking that has rediscovered its freedom, as it has emancipated itself from its medieval ontological predecessor. Yet, being the result of free thought, what it lays bare in nature is not freedom but laws, the so-called ‘natural laws’. Free thinking does not discover nor recognize its own freedom in the nature it is examining. Nowhere does science empirically observe freedom, let alone the free nature of its own thinking.

The only situation in which freedom can be experienced, Kant says, is moral reasoning. Asking myself how to act ethically, I discover the ability to freely subject myself to the universal law of reason – which is what I do when I apply the categorical imperative to my moral behavior. In a world in which murder is commonplace, only by the force of my free reason can I see on the one hand that a world in which murder is allowed generates an unfree universe and that, on the other hand, in a world where murder is forbidden, freedom is rendered possible. Subjecting myself freely to the prohibition on murder, I discover my rational freedom and cannot but suppose that also reality itself has something to do with that freedom.

Science lays bare the laws of the nature it examines, but the freedom operating in scientific praxis escapes that grip. And yet, this is precisely the way in which science ‘proves’ freedom, according to Kant: freedom shows something which escapes the determinism of laws. So we do know that freedom exists, Kant states, just like we know that freedom is that which reason in moral reflections discovers to be its essence, but we have no real (i.e., scientific) knowledge of it. And precisely in this respect freedom is free, i.e., not reducible it to natural (i.e., scientific) laws. Freedom is the highest and only authority man has to listen to, and that authority can only be obeyed: ‘obeyed’ by applying natural laws (in science); ‘obeyed’ by freely submitting oneself to the principle hypothesis underlying the reason that discovered those laws – a submission which, as Kant explains, happens in rational morality.

But is all this really so? Has science, critical as it is, not gone a step further, and discovered the laws of free thinking and the laws of freedom in general? In what follows I discuss the central thesis in the work of the Belgian philosopher Jan Verplaetse, a thesis announced in his 2009 book, Localising the Moral Sense, but fully elaborated in his not yet translated Dutch book of 2011 entitled, Zonder vrije wil (Without Free Will) (Verplaetse 2009; 2011). Verplaetse states that the progress that science has made since Kant allows us to reduce freedom to natural laws. The implication of this is that freedom as such no longer exists, nor does the moral feeling of guilt – so often accompanying our moral concerns. Verplaetse’s main argument is that the advanced modern sciences – and first of all the neurosciences – require such a conclusion. In the second part I discuss another book which focuses on neuroscience as well, but draws the opposite conclusion. Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do with Our Brain? states that the functioning of the brain shows us precisely how free human being and his thinking is (Malabou, 2008). In the last part, I will return to the de-ontologized condition modern thought is in. Facing the problem of the science of the human, and more precisely the way science deals with ideological critique, I will show the limits of neurology’s attempt to comprehend freedom.

Without Free Will

Today’s neurosciences allow insights into the causal processes underlying our mental activities, including the one that we, from time immemorial, call ‘free will’. But if these processes are really causal, so Verplaetse asks, does this not imply that the will is not as free as we think it is and that, even, such a thing as free will simply does not exist? For Verplaetse, this is the only possible conclusion. If neuroscientists themselves rarely draw that conclusion, it is because conclusions like that are by definition beyond the scope of their science.² But not beyond the scope of “philosophers”, Verplaetse writes. For philosophy’s domain is that of logical reasoning.³ If A and B and C lead to conclusion D, then the “philosopher” has to draw that conclusion, however mad, untenable or counter-intuitive it might seem. If the free will can be traced back to strictly causal processes, if every choice can be traced back to a chain of necessary reactions within the neurological system, then the will is causally determined and, hence, not free. Ergo: free will does not exist. Inside of me, there is no kind of separate thing that escapes logical causality and freely chooses what to do or not, what to think or not, what to wish or not. Such a free ‘thing’ is a mere illusion. Even if for centuries people have believed in its existence, this does not make it any less illusory.

But is this really so? Have past centuries thought this way about free will? Have they really believed that, within us, there is a kind of ‘homunculus’ escaping the laws, which our nature listens to? Certainly not Aristotle, for instance. A will existing apart from what he calls ‘φύσις’ (phusis) and escaping its causality, is according to him nonsense. According to Aristotle, there is only one thing that escapes causality, namely causality as such, or, what amounts to the same thing, being as such. And since everything and everyone that is shares being, everything and everyone participates in freedom, although each ‘species’ does this in a different way or degree. Thomas Aquinas, as well as medieval scholastic thinking in general, considered this problem in a similar way, except that for them, there is only one instance for whom Verplaetse’s qualification of a free will is entirely valid: God. God is the only one who is not bound to causal reality, since he is creator of it, having freely made reality out of nothing – ‘freely’, i.e., for no reason except his unbound sovereignty and infinite goodness.

When this God ‘died’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries something of his freedom was taken over by the new modern subject, the Cartesian cogito. Methodologically doubting all that there is, man discovered something that definitely escaped his doubt: his doubting itself, the ‘self’ undoubtedly present in his doubting, in his thinking. This is the way Descartes has put it, who considered the act of thinking as supported by a ‘res’, a ‘thing’, a ‘substance’.

Here – i.e., in the idea that next to my ‘mechanically’ functioning body (‘res extensa’), there is an autonomous and free agency which is the soul (‘res cogitans’) – we meet the only historical reference to the ‘free will’ as defined by Verplaetse. But already in Descartes’s own time, and certainly in the age after him, that idea was severely criticized. From Malebranche, through Spinoza and Leibniz, and up to the ‘existential’ analyses of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, there have been numerous ‘philosophical’ attempts made to show the untenable character of that idea and to formulate more realistic alternatives, which do not deny human freedom, but acknowledge its inherently situational and finite condition.

In fact, Verplaetse’s reference to neuroscience as well as the whole of his argument against the existence of a free will repeats a similar eighteenth century argumentation. The idea that all one can ascribe to the soul and free will can entirely be reduced to causal, bodily processes is a two and a half centuries old supposition. It was L’homme machine (Man, a Machine), a ‘philosophical’ manifesto by Julien Offray de La Mettrie from 1748, that ‘solved’ the problem of Cartesian dualism (man is two kinds of being, a free soul apart from a determined body) by declaring the soul to be non-existent (La Mettrie, 1996). The ‘res extensa’, the material world determined by causal laws, was the only reality that exists.

La Mettrie’s manifesto was decisive for the future of the modern ‘science of the human’, although his argument is in fact not very convincing, if only because it only says that it will be proved. The author again and again repeats that science will prove that everything we ascribe to the soul can be ascribed to bodily processes – which is to say that science has not delivered that proof yet. The future tense is still the main character of today’s argumentations on this topic, including that of Verplaetse. Neuroscience is still in the position that it (only) will prove that the totality of our behaviors and our thoughts are merely causal and in no sense free processes.

And why is it so important for Verplaetse to prove that there is no free will, that everything a human being does can be traced back to strict causality? The crux of his answer can be put it in a seemingly paradoxical way: because that insight makes us really free. It more specifically makes us free from false ideas such as responsibility and guilt. And it delivers society from endless and useless moral and other ‘reproaches’, which people make to one another. If free will does not exist, people cannot be responsible for what they do and consequently cannot be accused of being guilty. After all the cause of one’s behavior lays in the objective functioning of the brain – a cause that can scientifically be detected without accusing any person. We must free ourselves from those painful illusions that cause so much trouble and disturb so many juridical procedures. Responsibility and guilt must be evacuated from our courts. Juridical or moral questions should be treated in an enlightened, strictly rational way, seeking the answer to moral misbehavior by applying a strict deterministic causality excluding fantasies such as free will and responsibility. This, in a nutshell, is the mission of Verplaetse’s crusade against the illusion of free will.

Even if all this is logically correct, Verplaetse’s plea to leave behind imagination is naïve. As if we could simply get rid of such a thing as imagination. Would we be without guilty feeling once we know guilt is ‘just imagination’ and that the only real thing is merely a matter of neurological causality? Is consciousness that strong that it can annihilate feelings of guilt and responsibility once and for all?

Can a world in which nobody feels guilty be anything other than a world in which everyone acts as if s/he is without guilt, while in reality, s/he does feel guilty – at least guilty vis-à-vis a law saying one should not have feelings of guilt? Can a denial of a guilty conscience ever work other than as a law that forbids – and thus inadvertently feeds it?

It is strange that the ‘philosopher’ Verplaetse does not notice that the universe implied by his theory is in fact very similar to the Calvinistic universe of the seventeenth century. In its own way, Calvinism too declares guilty conscience senseless. Already before the beginning of time, God’s predestination has determined someone’s fate and arranged his entire life path in such a way that it could not escape universal causality.⁴ Here, too, it was rather absurd to feel guilty about trespasses one has made, for one was unable to influence ‘causal determinism’. Only, as quite soon became clear, the denial of that feeling made it all the more present, to such an extent that the consequences were nothing short of disastrous. Calvinist culture provoked a terrible and traumatic collective feeling of guilt. Can a life “without reproach”, as Verplaetse defines it (2011, p. 24, 130), be anything other than a life in which I – just like everyone else – am on the verge of reproaching everyone that they are on the verge of reproaching me of something?

Guilt, reproaches, affects, feelings: even if Verplaetse is right that these are but products of our imagination, the question is whether the reduction of that imagination to facts (to neurological processes in the brain for instance) is legitimate at all. Is there not something in imagination which persists despite being reduced to something else? Does imagination not imply that there is, if not a free ego, at least something like ‘freedom’? That, besides the causality of the brain and the neurological system, there is a space for freedom?

But what if the freedom present in imagination is nonetheless the product of the brain? What if the causality of the brain is not as strictly deterministic as Verplaetse claims it is? What if the brain is characterized by a plasticity that leaves room for a whimsicality comparable to that of the imagination?

Neuroscience as Ideology Critique

This is the thesis of Catherine Malabou’s book, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008). The title itself indicates her distance from Verplaetse’s thesis. It is not the brain which does something with us; it is us doing something with our brain. According to Malabou, the brain is not an inflexibly determined mechanism, but a process that is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Who Needs Critique?
• PART I Which Critique?
• PART II Some Critiques
• PART III Critical Praxes
• Afterword
• Index