VP
Jean Starobinski:
"The development of reflex theory at the end of the nineteenth century included important anthropomorphic considerations. We might well speak of reductionism to characterise the doctrine that made the reflex the elementary unit from which all mental life was constructed. From this point of view, the prerogatives granted to the willing subject, the free consciousness, and the 'I' disappear. When it appeared among twentieth century philosophers, this contextation acknowledged its origins in the works of Nietzsche and Freud, but without always being aware that these two writers were preceded by physicians and physiologists such as Thoma Laycock, William Carpenter, Hnery Maudsley, Wilhelm Griesinger, Moritz Schiff, Alexandre Herzen, and Theodule Ribot. It is from their works that Nietsche and Freud derived their arguments demystifying the spiritual powers upon which man prided himself. In addition to borrowing from these earlier writers, Nietsche and Freud both subscribed to a specific 'scientific' train of thought: the recognition of the human being's integral belonging to natural reality, but without continuing a 'grammatical habit' (Nietzsche) in which the 'I' considers itself responsible for its own thought. ... Reflexive mechanisms, described as objective phenomena or as regulating forces governing the universe of things, were henceforth seen as the most adequate explanation and best approximation of psychic phenomena. Whether one takes up the mechanistic thesis that, in the seventeenth century, denied souls to animals or adopts the form of vitalism that, in the nineteenth century, acknowledges the existence of a 'medullary soul', the result is the same: the processes that can be observed in the spinal chord take place in the cerebral mass as well. The action and reaction as manifested in the reflex arc become the fundamental material of the individual, whose every moment of existence is involved in integrating a variable sum of elementary processes, both sensory and motor. These processes unfold 'in the third person', and this thrid person comes to supplant the first person 'I'. The concept of reaction proved to be the active operator of this removal. One might say that the concept of reaction became - paradoxically - the agent of a revolution that deprived the thinker of the possibility of finding himself active." Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction, English edition, New York, 2003, Zone Books 1st pulished in French, 1999. p.145-6.
So part of Starbinski's thesis is that the nineteenth century saw developments in physiology - attributing a key role in animal behaviour to the reflex arc - which culminated in the twentieth century in the conception of the brain as the site of a complex of 'reflex arcs' which in their governance of behaviour - human behaviour included - denied any role to an autonomous will.
But more than this: he is identifying a seminal shift away from the conception of the self that was made so much of by those writing at the other end of the century: Austen, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx. These writers articulated what I am calling the turbid self: an entity half-hidden from both inner and outer person, but the essence of the person nonetheless, the 'I'. What happens, says Starobinski, is that the idea of this self is supplanted by the idea that processes in the brain control our behaviour, and that we refer to them in the third person.
Is it this? -
"The brain worked out where the hands needed to be in order to catch the ball and manouvred them into position" v. "I caught the ball."
Revised 30:03:04
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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
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