by Denis Larrivee
In 1748 Julian de la Mettrie published his best known philosophical
work, L’Homme Machine, Man a Machine.
Often thought to conceptualize the antithesis of a human anthropology, de la
Mettrie’s mechanistic and materialistic conception of human nature drew
inferences from medical observations he had made on bodily influences over
mental processes during illnesses. As a foreshadowing, de la Mettrie’s
‘anti-human’ anthropology resonates today in an empirical era that in recent
decades has seen an explosion of knowledge about neural processes. Its modern
resonance does not reflect today’s acceptance of his empirical inferences,
however, but rather the adoption of a similar philosophical and metaphysical
framework that de la Mettries was himself heir to in his youthful education,
which had sparked the empirical and later positivistic approaches to scientific
investigation of the material world in the 18th, 19th,
and 20th centuries, that of an Englishman, Roger Bacon and another
Frenchman, Rene Descartes.
Their legacy bequeathed to de la Mettrie a
profound and intended division of what was formerly an intended synthesis of
explananda for material reality. Roger Bacon’s selection of a posteriori,
efficient causal influences for the primary domain of natural investigation and
his relegation of form to an immutable, metaphysical Magic launched an
empiricist revolution that virtually eliminated the role of a priori explananda
from interpretive significance. Epistemologically, the scientific method
structured its interpretive conclusions by limiting to experimental design the a posteriori presuppositions latent in
its investigative approach. Restricted by design, a posteriori efficient causal
influences were no longer invoked as complementary explananda for extrinsic
interactions between category entities, but were instead used to explain the
categories themselves (i.e., categories were no longer sui generis). In a
modern setting, the well-known physicist Steven Weinberg epitomizes this
reductive approach to ever regressing material reality. This may be contrasted
with physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin’s synthetic approach to
metaphysical form. Importantly, it removed a whole domain of explananda for
interactions not included in contiguous, extrinsic relations, which were
defined by a priori, autonomously oriented undertakings and were propertied
features of a unique class of material entities, living organisms.
Confined to an a posteriori, explanatory
domain de la Mettrie evolved the propertied features of his mechanistic
anthropology: 1) compositional/reductive, 2) mechanistic/functional, and,
later, 3) deterministic, thereby eliminating as a property, autonomously
pursued options. The adoption of this property trio thus advanced the
antithesis to the three property states traditionally accorded to human nature:
a) the loss of its unity, that is, as a holism, entity, or single substance, b)
the loss of self, that is, as a center of action origin, and c) the loss of
freedom, that is, as in the undertaking of action, here understood the
implementation of agency, subject to rational decision making. Accordingly, it
eviscerated the notion of human nature as individuated, self present, and self-determined.
As appropriated in the modern era, and
amplified by post Cartesian Idealist luminaries like Locke and Kant, the Bacon/Descartes
empiricist legacy is often indiscriminately invoked in neuroscience across a
cognitive hierarchy. Their interpretive conclusions yield comparable
anthropological inferences to those of de la Mettrie, like Metzinger’s Ego
Tunnel and Wegner’s causal closure used to argue for determinist behavior. The
indiscriminate and exclusive application of a posteriori explananda, however,
is increasingly irreconcilable with global neuroscientific phenomena that
appear to be structured a priori as a dynamic outcome of autonomous pursuits.
I will argue this last argument by
comparing neuroscientific findings, which have been used to underwrite de la
Mettrie’s mechanical man at the levels of unity, action source, and action
selection, with those that provide for an opening to a more human anthropology
as revealed by neuroscience in a priori explananda entailing the dynamic
configuring of the human being as a locus of action. This argument will not be taken up here,
however, but will follow with installments contrasting the purposed charges
usually devoted to burnishing today's mechanical man versus the epistemological
rags often accorded to his countrified human cousin.
