HANDOUT PARIS 11-02-2009
Cesames
Université Paris Descartes
The Brain’s Borders
Dr. Maurizio Meloni (Rome, London)
Within
the centuries-long construction of a naturalistic anthropology in Modernity -
that is the story of “how the human animal has variously struggled to apply the
categories of scientific understanding to himself” (Harrington, 1987, 4) - the
figure of the brain has always played a pivotal role. If the philosopher has
often dreamt of a natural history of the soul (La Mettrie 1745), it is
only with the skull and the brain made “visible” by Gall that the concrete
possibility of making human beings a natural
object begins to flood Modern society and, in turn, to seduce scholars,
politicians, and educators alike. The current proliferation of neuro-cultures
and the impressive circulation of the brain across disciplines, which date at
least from the Decade of the Brain in the 1990’s, can be interpreted as the
last chapter of this longue-durée
history of naturalistic neuro-seductions throughout Modernity (though with some
innovative traits).
At the level of intellectual history, one can point out at least three
great waves of naturalization in Modernity.
In
each of these three waves, the brain – as an object of science as well as an
object of social identification - has played a crucial role in the
construction of a modern technology of the self.
Modernity as
a field of tension between (at least two) different epistemological projects.
Impact of Naturalism
At
a philosophical level, I have suggested elsewhere (Meloni 2009) to imagine
modernity as inhabited by two opposite trends struggling for the hegemony over
what makes us human. The first, naturalism, aims at a full application
of the categories of scientific understanding to human beings interpreted as
“natural objects” and has vehemently come back, over the last thirty years, to
the center stage of intellectual life under the impulse of research
programs in neuro- and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral
genetics, and so on. I interpret here naturalism less
as an epistemological standpoint, as customarily happens in the academic debate
in philosophy, and more as a global way of rethinking humanness, or,
in other words, as the theoretical “correlative”
(Foucault 2008) of certain concrete practices of naturalization of the human,
coming especially today from neuroscience and molecular biology.
The
second anthropological paradigm, antinaturalism is the intellectual
strategy that, from Kant onwards, has aspired to limit the absorption of
humanness into the discourse of natural science through the construction of a
protected sphere of morality and culture where subjectivity can strip itself
from the rules of scientific protocols.
If we think
how the figure of the brain has constantly played a pivotal role in the
development of the first paradigm, the naturalistic one, it is not difficult to
understand the current neuro/bioethical fight around the brain as the last
chapter, and a perfect case study indeed, of a centuries-long tension that has
monopolized the modern intellectual landscape.
Philosophical
resistances to naturalism and biologization of human identity in Modernity. The
rise of “life itself” as a philosophical problem.
The
application of naturalistic categories to the definition of human beings,
especially when biologically employed, has
traditionally raised strong resistances from the philosophical side. These
resistances are easily classifiable following a threefold pattern of reactions:
1) Naturalism felt as a Break; 2) Naturalism felt
as a Danger; 3) and finally, Naturalism felt as a Loss.
To
refer specifically to the employ of the brain, at least from the moment of
Hegel’s famous confrontation with Gall’s phrenology (1807/1977), philosophers
have traditionally shown scepticism about the relevance of what Karl Jaspers
later called “brain mythology” (Jaspers 1948), as an adequate basis for a genuine understanding of the human condition.
In
a celebrated passage of the Phenomenology
of Spirit (Hegel 1977: 185 ff), Hegel famously criticizes phrenology
for his implausible attempt to “ascertain the laws of the objective knowledge
of individuality.” Gall’s project, as interpreted by Hegel, is the naïve
expression of the Self-Consciousness at its first stages of development, where
the Self strives to recognize itself in some exterior and accidental “osseous
form” (Hegel 1977: 204), and therefore has mistaken a mere thing – the skull - for “the external trace of the most profound
interiority” (Hyppolite 1974: 267). Hegel regards Gall’s “palpable wisdom” -
deduction of the “true reality” of a human being from its cranial capacity- as
an irremediable loss of the richness of the geistlich
life. With plastic representations of the centuries-long clash between a
naturalistic anthropology (constructed around the role of the skull-brain), and
the post-Kantian-Continental tradition, Hegel famously concludes his point by
suggesting that the only possible way to deal with the phrenologist would be
“breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that” (Hegel 1977:
205).
More
in general, in the Twentieth Century, this opposition to naturalism
radicalises.
During
the Thirties, a first wave of resistances is easily detectable in the works of
authors like:
Alexandre
Kojève, with his
celebrated description of a “post historical” stage of humanity in which, once man has returned to an animal state
again:
“ (….) ses arts, ses amour
set ses jeux doivent eux-aussi re-devenir purement
‘naturels’[-1].
Il faudrait donc admettre, qu’après la fin de l’Histoire, les hommes
construiraient leurs édifices et leurs ouvrages d’art comme les oiseaux
construisent leur nids et les araignées tissent leurs toiles[1],
exécuteraient des concerts musicaux à l’instar des grenouilles et des cigales,
joueraient comme jouent les jeunes animaux et s’adonneraient à l’amour comme le
font les bêtes adultes » (Kojève 1933-1939: 1969)
In
a short text written by a young Emmanuel Lévinas, in the year
immediately after Hitler’s ascent (1934), that addresses the enchaînement[2]
to our biology as the distinctive mark of the Nazi ideology. In Nazism, Lévinas claims, « le
biologique avec tout ce qu’il comporte de fatalité devient plus qu’un objet de la vie spirituelle, il en devient le coeur” (Lévinas : 1934/1997).
After the second world
war, first Hannah Arendt and then Michel Foucault address the
increasing intertwinement of the “life itself” and politics in Modernity as one
of the most urgent philosophical issues. Arendt
clearly emphasizes the tie between biologism and totalitarianism, and radically
confronts philosophy with the fact that, in modernity, Bios - the biographical, cultural life - is increasingly collapsing
into Zoe - the natural, animal, bare
Life (Arendt 1958). Foucault’s work on biopolitics is much more known, and
today at the root of a long list of contemporary works (Agamben, Esposito)
addressing the issue of a deeply biopolitical/thanatopolitical dimension of
Modernity.
More recently,
philosophical resistances to the “cerebral subject”, and to the naturalization
of the human existence in general, can be today classified mainly following a
threefold pattern:
All these three lines of criticism to the
naturalization of identity situate themselves at a normative level from which
to judge the inadequacies of what is coming to light today in terms of homo
neurobiologicus. While this is certain a legitimate stance, I suggest here
a different approach: that is, to let this new profile of the human overtly
come to light in order to understand how this new figure challenges (and
sometimes traumatises) our inherited view, and pushes us to clarify what is at
stake in the present intertwinement of science and the human condition. Homo
Neurobiologicus is meaningful to our present to the extent that it represents a
piece of a contemporary ontology of ourselves.
My rough genealogy of the Homo Neurobiologicus is the following. From 1975 onward, we have
witnessed the rise of several research programs: from the rise of socio-biology
and evolutionary psychology to the advent of ethology and behavioral
genetics; from the emergence of neuro- and cognitive science to that of Chomskyan
linguistics, today recast in neurobiological terms; from the dawn of the “second
biological psychiatry” with its emphasis on a molecular diagnostic style,
and its focus on the biochemistry of the brain as the crucial site for mental
disorders, to the creation of psychopharmacology.
The global results of all
these programs, beyond their single differences, has been to produce a dramatic
renegotiation of the boundary between nature and culture, and a global
redefinition of the profile of our humanness in terms of an increasing
weight of naturalistic arguments.
From psychiatry to philosophy, from anthropology to
the social sciences, over the last thirty years a massive swell of naturalistic
rhetoric has increasingly occupied the domain of what we once were so proud to
consider supremely cultural, historical, and social matters -- all the
phenomena for which the German Idealists coined the expression Geist.
This
change should be seen not only in terms of a fundamental shift of attention and
sensibility, from culture to biology, from language to the brain, from ethics
to genes, in the explanation of what makes us specifically human, but
more fundamentally in the emergence of
a sort of zero history/zero society/“pure nature” picture of the human,
a human who speaks through (or even “is”) his/her amygdale, limbic system or
prefrontal cortex. This figure is in fact part of a general trend that can be
called: “bare life naturalism” or “life itself naturalism”.
Often novelists, more than
scientists, are aware of the relevance of this shift, and keen to let this new
profile come to light. Take for instance these two quotations from Ian
McEwan’s recent novel Saturday, where each of the central characters
is defined largely through his or her relation to neurobiology: the main
character, Henry Perowne, is a successful neurosurgeon, and two of the other
featured characters are Perowne’s brain-hazed mother and Baxter, a young thug
Perowne will diagnose with Huntington’s disease.
In the background of the novel there seem to be only two great (meta)-political
actors: the war (and the challenge of radical Islamists to our civilization) on
one side, and on the other, the brain, the gene, and a frozen naturalistic gaze
through which we are more and more learning to see ourselves “at the molecular
level”: “Perhaps down at the molecular level” McEwan writes about Perowne
referring to a typical ‘molecular’ imaginary “there’s been a chemical accident
while he slept – something like a
spilled tray of drinks, prompting dopamine-like receptors to initiate a kindly cascade of intracellular
events.” Or for instance, when describing two nurses
crossing a square, McEwan immerses himself in a completely biological
perspective on human beings: “In the lifeless cold, they pass through the
night, hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain,
endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone
casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their invisible glow of
consciousness – these engines devise their own tracks”. (McEwan 2005)
I take these two
quotations from McEwan’s novel as a symptom of the emergence of this “Bare Life
Naturalism” - a naturalism that
aesthetically before than epistemologically aspires to make use of the bare,
bodily, material dimension of life (“life itself” at the level of its genes and
neurones) as the
new key site where to reconfigure the profile of the human. In this novel
relationship between mind and body, brain and spirit, mainly characterised by
the “flattening of the distance” (Rose 2007) between the two, one can find the building blocks of a new “anthropology of the contemporary” (Rabinow
2008).
Relevance for psychotherapy
I would like finally to
discuss the impact on psychotherapy of this possible new figure of the human
coming to light today in the public space. Just some hints and questions:
1)
Where can one collocate the brain discourse
in relation to psychoanalysis? The brain was at the origin (an origin if not
cancelled, certainly left behind) of the Freudian discourse, but almost absent
from the psychoanalytic construction, and then again at the centre of the
current biological psychiatry, which is clearly post-Freudian and post (if not
anti) psychoanalytical. Is neuro-psychoanalysis a legitimate discourse, or the
illegitimate conflation of two irreducible styles of enquiry?
2)
To what extent is the
emergence of the cerebral subject/homo neurobiologicus/bare life naturalism
traumatic for that dialectical
space space of historical and inter-personal relationships (and conflict)
through which something like our psychic space was invented one century ago
(again mainly, but not only, through psychoanalysis)? I follow here Rose’s
interpretation: “Over the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century,
human beings came to understand themselves as inhabited by a deep interior
psychological space, and to evaluate themselves and act upon themselves in
terms of this belief. But
over the past half century, that deep space has begun to flatten out (…). This is a shift
in human ontology – in the kinds of persons we take ourselves to be.” (Rose
2007).
3)
How can the clinician deal with such an
entirely naturalized portraiture of the human who projects his/her identity
onto his/her bodily part?
4)
What gets lost, if any, in the shift from a
figure of the human caught in the network of her/his family, social, historical
relationship, narratives and symbolic/institutional dimension, and the
neurobiological human attached and identified with her/his cerebral dimension,
difference or even “deficit”?
[1] Please notice how much this
metaphor is present today in naturalistic descritpion for instance of the rise
of language from the brain-mind system (Pinker for instance)
[2] And what he calls: “être rivé”.
[3] Phenomenology would be a fourth
point of resistance, but here for sake of synthesis I have to skip the topic.
[-1]è quello che ho detto ieri e lo vorrei ridire qui: il Naturalismo è una possibilità dell’Umaneismo e della Filosofia della Storia