Resisting neurosciences and sustaining history

The ‘challenge’ from the neurosciences

The moment of speech has its special purpose, but passes. Nonetheless, this article retains something of the provocation that speaking has. There are two aims: to restate why the neurosciences should not be allowed to dictate the agenda for the history of the human sciences; and to state this in a way that addresses the future prospects of the journal History of the Human Sciences. The article’s interest is not philosophical argument or historical substance but rhetoric, not to be superficial but to pinpoint large issues. It derives from a request to contribute to a conference on ‘The Future of the Human Sciences’, which clearly had as a theme the response of the human sciences to claims being made on behalf of the neurosciences – and to the funding regime going with this. Asked for a summary before the conference, I originally wrote an emotional response, opposed to having the neurosciences once again shaping the agenda. I then censored this as too likely to be written off as a refusal to engage with what is actually going on in the academic world. All the same, at another conference, where the implications of the neurosciences for European law were under discussion, I declared to my neighbour that if anyone mentioned the amygdala again I would scream. This article sets out to unpack these reactions, give their reasons and restate a view of what the history of the human sciences is about. This is offered as support to the journal, History of the Human Sciences, which organized the conference at which I gave this talk.

Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached (2013) chided social scientists, and by implication scholars in the humanities, for what they saw as a fear of becoming biological subjects and for an emotional unwillingness to take the neurosciences on board. They thought this fear derived in part from lack of knowledge about what the brain sciences were achieving, but more especially from anxiety about loss of control over the intellectual direction of specialist fields in the social sciences and humanities. Whatever point these judgements may have, they are, this article argues, wrong in intellectual substance. The resistance to neurosciences is active not fearful: these sciences do not provide the kind of knowledge or understanding that humanities subjects, or social sciences with the same form of knowledge, do. If there is ‘fear’, it is fear of withdrawal of funding for the humanities or the interpretive social sciences. There is ‘fear’ managers find it easier to place everyone on the same playing field of competition for funds, a purpose well served by belief that there is one form of understanding led by one field, the neurosciences.

There is nothing dogmatic at stake in this reaction. To turn to ‘the history of the human sciences’ is to choose a working title valuable as such precisely because it keeps open thought about what new developments there are and where new developments are taking place or will take place. If the neurosciences are intellectually demonstrating that only these sciences can explain human affairs, it has to be shown. It has not been shown, and many people think cannot rationally be shown, whatever the publicly and politically influential representation of the knowledge the neurosciences are supposedly achieving, as not a few neuroscientists themselves agree. One of the original editors of History of the Human Sciences, Irving Velody, liked to say that the journal must be receptive to art history or classics, for instance, hardly disciplines usually associated with the human sciences, because intellectual arguments in such disciplines might turn out to be of the greatest significance for the human sciences generally. ¹ We don’t know. The conference, to which I contributed this discussion, marked (a little late, to be sure) the journal’s quarter century and it celebrated the many years Jim Good, the journal’s retiring editor, gave to fostering just this liberality and to helping scholars give substance and articulacy to breadth.

Why the polemical expression, ‘resisting the neurosciences’? (The neurosciences are usually, but surely falsely, called neuroscience, in the singular.) Let me start with two clichés of contemporary commentary. First, with apologies to Chris Renwick, our fine conference organizer, who wrote in the invitation to the meeting: ‘The problem of the human. How developments in the neurosciences are challenging…’ There is, it hardly needs stating, an enormous investment in brain sciences and a daunting mass of new detail of interest to specialists. Is it not this institutional presence, rather than profound new intellectual insight, that offers the challenge? To press home this point, imagine reversing the cliché in order to ask: ‘How developments in the history of the human sciences are challenging neurosciences’. The strangeness of this reversal shows how far people defer to institutionally given agendas. To what extent, and in what sense, are claims made for neurosciences reconfiguring the human shaping new concepts or forms of understanding? ²

This is a natural question for an author with a background in 19th-century debates relating mind to brain, an age when specialist disciplines of experimental physiology, neurology, psycho-physiology and psychology were beginning to acquire institutional form. There were then numerous zealous proponents of the view, expressed in intellectual debate and in wider public settings, that new knowledge of the brain ‘challenged’ belief about human nature. Comparing debate then and now, three dimensions seem obviously new, though it is an open question as to whether this is novelty in scale or in substance.

First, most obviously, new technology and hence new possibilities in prosthetics, robotics and biochemical engineering (drugs, genetics), make it possible, in the most literal sense, to rebuild what it is to be a person.

Second, the contemporary neurosciences obtain and absorb huge resources, with the expectation that this will influence social policy, business and medicine, on a scale that scientists in the 19th century could scarcely imagine. Happily, Jonna Brenninkmeijer, in her paper on neuromarketing presented at the conference in which this article was conceived, gave an example of what this means in practice, making possible discussion with a specific content (Brenninkmeijer, 2016). There are indeed people ‘out there’ making commercial application of what they claim is new knowledge of the brain and the being of a person.

Thirdly, there is a huge amount of detailed new knowledge, and there is a flood of literature (by no means in agreement or establishing unified neuroscience, in the singular) for scientists and for the public announcing what this new knowledge is. It is not for an intellectual historian to assess empirical claims in science – it would be foolish, and it is not the agenda here. It may well be that new knowledge and especially new technologies are changing human identities, as reproductive and trans-gender technologies are doing, with large social consequences. Yet what precisely is new about brain technology reflexively changing the human, about technology recreating the image of what it is to be human? ³ Let me put the question in its most polemical form: Is the technology of virtual realities intrinsically different in its human effects from the technology of the stirrup? Human history is a history of human self-recreation through production. Perhaps the contemporary shift of scale is so great that we are witness to the emergence of qualitatively new life? Yet the re-creation of life was long a utopian aspiration of Christian communities, as it was in Russian and then in Soviet thought about ‘the new man’. Because there are religious or humanist participants in debate who fear technological innovation and an image of the human built on the neurosciences, this does not necessarily imply that we face new intellectual challenges. ⁴ For instance, though the neurosciences are said to show that there is no ‘real self’, just this conclusion is also a large theme in ‘theory’ in the humanities and in analyses of the culture of late capitalism. Throughout the 19th century, there was a vivid literature of ‘the other’ (Frankenstein’s monster with no name, Mr Hyde, Dracula, spirit possession, multiple personality, or just, simply, the beast of drink) that questioned belief in the unitary self. What the neurosciences do seem to demand is facing new modes of life, modes of life that it is not at all unreasonable to argue will not foster the values many desire. Belief that science is somehow intrinsically humane in its social effects is simply naïve.

The brain and selfhood

The other cliché featured in statements that neuroscience views of the self have taken over is the following. Alongside contemporary statements deconstructing the self, there are contemporary institutions devoted to forming, or selling, new kinds of selfhood, some of which claim a basis in brain sciences. This double-speak, asserting and denying the self, deserves separate attention. This article, however, sticks to claims like this: ‘It was in the era of postmodernity that people became their brains’, and ‘Selfhood and brainhood collapsed together [collapsed into each other]’ (Casper, 2014: 27). ⁵ The reference slid over the difference between imagined and actual cultural change, and the point was to stress the potential outcome of the rise of neurology and neuroscience. But for whom might it be said that they have ‘become their brains’? It is not true for me or for my friends. It is certainly not true for tens of thousands of refugees incarcerated on borders with identities, either their own or assigned to them by countries that do not want them. In political contexts, there is no equation of citizenship and brain. This makes it a matter for empirical research, perhaps for ethnography, to learn who understands selfhood as brainhood and in what ways. But, to put it mildly, it is a minority position found only in certain wealthy places in the world (in offices of neuromarketing companies, perhaps). For the refugee, notions of brainhood are worse than inconsequential. Of course, someone might say refugees really are just brains but are too ignorant to know it, and there should be a political response to work on their brains, that is, apply psychopharmacology.

Having vented indignation by imagining this, let it be followed by the cooler, logical point that belief identifying brain and self is simply incoherent. By telling a story about how people have ‘become their brains’, a person takes on the identity of a story-teller, not a brain. Everyday talk is not about brains but about people. The very articulation of brain science shows entities that are not brains at work. The humanities and social sciences provide knowledge of people, in all their unbounded complexity, including knowledge of people who say they are not people but brains. The intellectually ‘challenging’ questions are not about people becoming their brains but about how anybody could come to say such things. That is a question for social scientists to take up, and also for historians, and it is a question for the history of political economy and the history of culture rather than specifically for the history of science. The question is taken up in impressive detail and richness in Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega’s study Being Brains (Vidal and Ortega, 2017).

The human sciences ‘face the challenge’ (to perpetuate this cliché of contemporary rhetoric) of understanding the richness and persistence of non-neuro forms of understanding being human, the self and identity. ⁶ These understandings give History of the Human Sciences its field. This is not a statement designed to exclude neuro understandings (this talk or article was presented in a session about just that) but designed to focus on the relation of those understandings to other understandings. The sheer richness of everyday language not in neuro terms, the language celebrated in the novel, all the varieties of aesthetic, religious, playful or identity talk, and so on and on, is hardly in need of statement. Any claim that the neurosciences understand or will understand all of this is extreme nonsense or extreme institutional imperialism or both. The philosopher of science, A. I. Tauber, observed,

Human experience demands different kinds of knowing, and to argue for some singular method or universal epistemological structure belies, and ultimately distorts, the complexities of how humans live…Ignoring this seemingly obvious observation has led to much controversy. (Tauber, 2013: 18) ⁷

The question of the relation between forms of knowledge is highly pertinent to contemporary debate about the neurosciences. A number of philosophers of mind and neurophysiologists have attracted a lot of attention by strongly tying the philosophy of mind to the science of neurophysiology. At its most emphatic (which many people who seek closer philosophy–science relations do not accept), this is the programme of eliminative materialism, a theory of knowledge arguing that brain science will fully replace so-called folk psychology. The analytic literature is extensive and contentious. It includes substantial arguments defending the content and purposes of everyday knowledge of human actions from elimination by neuro-truth, arguments that underlie the present article. ⁸

Naturalistic understanding

These issues, complex enough in themselves, are expressions of the long-running Western preoccupation with scientific naturalism, with the belief that only a form of understanding based on what scientists know of humankind’s place in nature is the basis for true statements about being human and the basis for rational action. Naturalism shapes the culture of natural scientists, and of many social scientists too, though, once again, it is an empirical question how widely naturalism informs daily life and social or political activity, as opposed to work in the lab. A number of hard-nosed neuroscientists who take naturalism for granted get publicity, especially when, as they like to say, they have no time for philosophy since they are too busy uncovering the facts of nature. It’s easy to see, though, that any statement to the effect that we don’t need philosophy is itself a stupid philosophical statement. Among philosophers, there are substantial differences of view about the possibilities for naturalism. There appears to be no agreement, and even to be rancorous disagreement, about the relations between philosophical statements and empirical, scientific statements. Strong philosophical criticism of neuro-reductionism comes from those who, opposing naturalism, believe, in logic, that philosophical and scientific statements are different in kind (Bennett and Hacker, 2003; also debate in Bennett et al., 2007). The difficulty for these philosophers, to venture a comment, is that their position requires them to state the relation between the two kinds of statement, philosophical and scientific, and that remains a consuming philosophical task. (It is certainly not a neuro-scientific task.)

Naturalistic culture has seen the translation of the mind–body problem into the problem of consciousness. For much of the 20th century, the former was understood as a problem for the philosophy of mind. In later decades, however, attention shifted to re-create the problem as one for the neurosciences. Under the heading of ‘the hard problem’ (reference to which is now another cliché), there is a scientific search, dependent on some as yet unknown development of brain science, to explain the character of qualities (or qualia, like redness) of the conscious world in terms of neuronal processes. ‘Making biological sense of sentience is the task we face’, as one scientist puts it (Godfrey-Smith, 2016). ⁹ This use of ‘we’, ambiguously the biologist-writer and the reader, but rhetorically enrolling the reader as would-be biologist, is revealing. Perhaps the reader does not in fact have a biological agenda. There are forms of knowledge (variants of phenomenology, for instance) for which sentience is not the problem but the ground, the immediate awareness, the intuition, the reality of life, on which to build knowledge – including biological knowledge.

In some discussions, it is as if reference to the hard problem, or the problem of consciousness, has eaten up other things on the agenda, like the relations between forms of knowledge; thus it appears that an empirical programme leading to scientific advance will take over everything else. I would note, though, that many scholars believe that understanding consciousness is not an empirical problem, or not only an empirical problem, but requires conceptual and metaphysical work. ¹⁰ We know, notably, that the English word ‘consciousness’ is modern, that Aristotelian and ancient thought about the soul did not have such a concept but referred to aisthēsis (sensation, feeling) and that it is by no means clear whether there is a concept comparable to consciousness in different contemporary cultures. ¹¹ Who is consciousness a problem for and what sort of a problem is it? These are large questions for the humanities and social sciences.

As for the neurosciences dictating agendas, it is significant, as Fernando Vidal has noted, that it is the humanities or human sciences, not the neurosciences, that have supplied the categories of subject area called neuro-ethics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-history and so forth, even though enthusiasts for neuro-explanations say that the human sciences or humanities have ‘failed’ to establish knowledge in ethics, aesthetics and the like. ¹² Ironically, handing over the study of these fields to the neurosciences may have the effect of eliminating the practices that gave rise to the categories of subject area in the first place. But neuro-enthusiasts are blind to the history of this, since they have no interest in history, except insofar as it is a source of clichés about the roots of what they themselves do. My argument is certainly not to keep history, natural or social science and public debate separate (though, clearly, they have different purposes), but to maintain that historians should have the confidence not to be subservient to the agendas established by current science (or indeed current cultural theory). ¹³ To say how historical work relates to the present is another ‘challenge’; but it is one that historians of science in particular, and historians in general, take on any time they move outside their specialist communities.

History of the human sciences

I want to discern tasks for the history of the human sciences. As concerns the neuro disciplines, these tasks encompass, first, the intellectual development of relations between different purposes and forms of understanding. Second, they encompass the reflexive relations between knowledge and practice, in ways the natural sciences do not. If the neurosciences involve reconfiguring the human, then this is there to be studied. Vidal has indeed proposed the study of brainhood (which is not equivalent to a new form of the self) as the emergence of the modern ‘anthropological figure’ of humanity (Vidal, 2009, 2015).

‘The history of the human sciences’ is an umbrella term, a working heading under which to address the kind of issues that have just been formulated (Smith, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2001). As regards institutional identity and practices, it does not seem either possible or necessary to specify the content of the human sciences. (The article gets to the ‘history’ in a minute.) The phrase is there for use as local circumstances suggest and micro-political struggles about the social organization of research and teaching determine. In some settings, the human sciences centre on human biology and medicine, in other settings, the psychological and social sciences, and in yet others, the humanities. All the same, the naming of institutional affiliations is not just a matter of being pragmatic, since each affiliation carries with it different intellectual baggage and cultural values. It is special, ‘virtuous’, that the human sciences are reflexive about this. The field as a matter of fact includes – and this a rational necessity – dialogue about the nature and scope of the field itself. This is not navel-gazing but reflexiveness practised for an intellectual purpose characteristic of humanities disciplines. The human sciences cannot but seek to include knowledge of the arguments in reason for the differences in the various forms of knowledge, an understanding of the social processes housing these forms of knowledge in different disciplines and institutions, and investigation of the consequences for ways of being human (or ‘forms of life’).

Such reflexiveness requires history, the history of the human sciences. Debate on the relations between forms of knowledge requires it: these forms of knowledge do not exist independently of the contingent place they have come to occupy in the social world. To be sure, there have been structuralist and post-structuralist agendas that have rejected history as a form of disciplined understanding; but a great deal of scholarship does not accept this rejection, and the rejection itself has a history. Here, perhaps, is one reason for the large interest History of the Human Sciences has taken in Foucault’s work: that work has been pivotal for debate about the relations of structuralist (or post-structuralist) and historical modes of understanding.

It is obvious that the points being made leave the journal, History of the Human Sciences, without a ‘natural’ institutional home. It belongs everywhere and nowhere. This may be a substantial practical problem when it comes to securing institutional support and attracting attention, but it is not an intellectual problem to call into question what is taken to be ‘natural’. There is certainly space for a journal that refuses to tie itself down by disciplinary boundaries – and takes much interest in what those boundaries mean in the first place. ¹⁴ Funding bodies keep saying they want inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary work. Let them take note…

Reading what people in fact write, it is possible sometimes to wonder whether there are authors, including contributors to History of the Human Sciences, who rather wish ‘history’ would drop out of the phrase ‘history of the human sciences’. Other scholars, perhaps, quietly and, as they think, tactfully, ignore what they find a slightly awkward verbal legacy from earlier times. ¹⁵ After all, ‘the human sciences’, without reference to history, would seem adequate as a heading under which to get on with discussing knowledge and the imagined world of the future opened by the neurosciences. The speculative discussion of where things are now going, though clearly pertinent to the human sciences, and exciting, financially rewarded and even ‘sexy’, does not seem to me especially to belong to the history of the human sciences. The history, however, can be highly pertinent. For example, as stated, the reflexive practice intrinsic to a notion of the human sciences requires history, especially for knowledge of the relations of forms of understanding in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.

There are further reasons. The inclusion of the word ‘history’ draws the human sciences towards identification with the humanities. It is also a rhetorical reminder that the humanities disciplines, including history, historically and in contemporary continental European word usage, have the status of sciences. There are significant contexts in which knowledge may be ‘science’ without being ‘natural science’. Finally, the word supports academic norms: ‘the history’ in the history of the human sciences at a minimum mediates and at an optimum guarantees attention to meaning and truth. This sounds pretentious. Yet the social fact is many people, not only some of those who have the privilege to be intellectuals or scholars, expect knowledge to speak truth to being human. We know this, for instance, from the public involvement with debate about science and religion; and we know it from public engagement with the brain sciences. What the ‘history’ in the history of the human sciences signals, I suggest, is a commitment to keeping open discussion about being human, drawing, as we must, on the debates that have gone on and continue to go on. One of the most familiar of these debates, for academics who work in the psychological and social sciences, centred on the relation of the forms of understanding, respectively causal and interpretive, characteristic of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften). OK. This looks like a tired debate: scholars working within the framework of post-structuralist theories, or impressed by the rise of the neurosciences, may think the action is elsewhere. But whether it is so depends on where one stands. For every artist imagining the human of the future, there is a best-selling author telling a story of the past.

In Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature, I laid out, as far as I was able, the reasons why history has an essential, not merely contingent, place in the human sciences (Smith, 2007). To say, ‘as far as I was able’, is not to play at being modest but to recognize that anyone who talks about being human comes up against issues that spiral one into another and that no one author will resolve. It is tempting to think that each issue should be left to specialists to contribute to the already large literature in whichever field they work. If, however, there is to be dialogue between different fields (‘interdisciplinarity’), the history of the human sciences is an invaluable umbrella. This is not the place to recap arguments of the earlier book: history has purposes in cultural life natural science does not; history is a rigorous and systematic discipline, with a claim to truth, and hence a ‘science’ in the older sense of the word; the history of interpretive understanding is knowledge of the reasons history has been thought a science; historical knowledge contributes narrative, and the understanding of narrative is fundamental to the notion of being human; human self-knowledge and action are mutually constitutive, or, belief changes a person and what a person does changes belief. Also, the point is not whether what was in the book was sustainable or sustained. The point is that ‘the history’ in ‘the history of the human sciences’ encompasses debate about what it is to be human, and this gives the domain and the journal, History of the Human Sciences, an interest larger than the creation of yet another academic specialty. ¹⁶ Even in settings where the direction of contemporary argument is to deny ‘the human’ as a category, this direction, too, comes within the scope of the field.

It is part of the post-positivist settlement in the theory of knowledge to accept that any body of knowledge contains presuppositions that it cannot ground. No theory is ever complete. From this it follows that the quality and persuasiveness of an argument rationally depends on exemplification in concrete instances as well as on theoretical deduction. The particulars of what a theory can accomplish in specific instances matter for the standing the theory has. The particulars in the human sciences – the historically located particulars – are not a list of ‘one damn thing after another’ but the life of ways of thought, of theory, about being human. We know, in practice, that historical writing on the human subject may have impact: A. O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions, Daniel Heller-Roazen’s The Inner Touch (Lovejoy, 1960[1936]; Foucault, 2006[1961]; Haraway, 1990; Heller-Roazen, 2007). The most persuasive argument for the history of the human sciences lies in performance. This being so, an unsympathetic voice might call on this article to close. Indeed, I should like to move on, to discuss work that is not shaped by the agenda of the neurosciences but, developing another agenda, in practice ‘resists’ them. ¹⁷

Conclusion

This article resists intellectual and scholarly agendas dominated by, or even exclusively shaped by, the neurosciences. ‘Money speaks’, of course. Nonetheless, the reductive naturalism that would specify what is in the world exclusively in terms of neuronal processes is untenable. The very activity of writing and reading such statements requires other forms of knowledge. Nor can natural scientists be allowed to get away with the pretension that they ‘do not do’ philosophy: by practice, they preach. It seems a considerable number of neuroscientists would agree with both these points. If there is a reduction of the human to brainhood going on ‘out there’, as there is in some quarters, it does not have much intellectual purchase in philosophy or the human sciences. The concern, rather, is that the rush of practice, that is, major investment of financial, institutional and intellectual resources, is leading towards a political economy and a technological culture as if reductive naturalism were true. Given human reflexivity, in time, it is possible to imagine it becoming true. Fine, some people will conclude.

Resistance to this comes from the belief that in the contemporary world the truly hard problems are political. No amount of neuroscience addresses or will address them. The history of the human sciences, drawing on the humanities, creates resources for dialogue between different claims to knowledge of ‘the human’ (including the claim that ‘the human’ is disappearing, as Foucault predicted it would, like a footprint on the seashore). Dialogical thought, and imagination for the good life that feeds it, requires reflection on the agenda, not just empirical knowledge, of the neurosciences. As Bakhtin asserted, discussing what he meant by dialogue (and he wrote about this at a time when there was a large-scale endeavour to shut dialogue down, and certainly to shut down his dialogue), any word has meaning in a context, that is, in dialogue with other words. There is an ‘internal dialogism of the word’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 279). This is surely and pressingly so for the word ‘human’ – yet the word is always situated, and ‘every specific situation is historical’ (ibid.: 33).