Continental Philosophy and Neuroscience
Term:
Spring 2010
Subject Code:
GPHI
Course Number:
6106
This course aims to confront current neurobiology with continental
thought on the issue of subjectivity. In neurobiological discourse, the “self”
is often thought to be a simple collection of neural patterns that therefore
cannot be a transcendental instance. We will consider the most radical version
of this reductionist position, the understanding, that is, that our
subjectivity is nothing more than a piece of meat, the gray matter of the brain
itself.
Yet instead of directly opposing this statement, we will take seriously
its demand that the brain be precisely understood, and then show with Nietzsche
how it can be displaced and changed from within.
Nietzsche is the first philosopher to affirm that biology may be a
critical instance of subjectivity : body (Leib) and consciousness are originary biological instances governed
by the will to power, which itself must be understood as a version of the
Spinozist conatus, the endeavor to live and persist, a natural movement that
both exposes us to wounds and protects us against them. Our thoughts are the
“interpretations” of the neural impulses created and formed by this constant
exposure.
We will follow a trajectory through Ecce
Homo, that presents a living subject open to suffering, pain, illness and
desire, a subject that is thus irreducible to both the Cartesian framework of
the substance and the Kantian determination of the subject as transcendental
aperception. Proving once more his untimeliness, Nietzsche anticpates, without
being aware of it, a number of lines of neurobiological research (such as those
of Damasio, Sacks, and Solms) where the subject is understood to be synonymous
with the “emotional brain”. At the same
time, he provides a basis for dismantling the notion of a neural identity by
showing that life is never identical to itself. No need, then, to protect
philosophy against biology, contrarily to Heidegger declares in his Nietzsche…
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