This afternoon, as I gave my second lecture, I found my thought process a bit sluggish. Here and there I would stumble over a word, mispronounce something, or formulate an awkward sentence. Associations weren’t coming to the tip of my tongue as quickly as they often do. I had not yet eaten lunch and had had a very small breakfast, so the sluggishness of my thought process was literally a function of having no gas to run my engines. Yet consciously, phenomenologically, this sluggishness, this lack of alertness, all seemed to me to be a failure of my own will. That is, they felt as if they were my own doing. I am not sure what is worse… Blaming such moments on oneself, or being haunted by the momentary phantasm that none of these things are one’s own doing, that ultimately we’re a sort of machine governed by very complex cause and effect relations over which we have no ultimate control. In such moments a sort of nausea flows over me and I’m horrified by the thought that perhaps my sense that I direct myself, that I will actions, that I am an agent is nothing but an epiphenomenal illusion and that every thought I have, every emotion I experience, every feeling of failure and moral guilt I suffer, everything I seem to will is nothing but the ticking away of a very complex machine where I am ultimately absent. Can anyone not experience horror at the vision of the cap of one’s skull cut open, revealing that fiberous network of neuronal connections where electro-chemical reactions flash and burst without any centralized co-ordination, all the while realizing that that is you? What cruel creator would create a machine that is conscious of itself as an illusion? What accident of nature could produce such an abomination? Fortunately I quickly forget such horrifying phantasms and return to the reassuring thought that I’m somehow directing myself and am not simply an epiphenomenal mist arising out of a network of essentially random connections and processes.
January 16, 2008 at 4:38 am
A pedagogical luster is always-already a condition of a fetishistic disavowal–though, when I slip up during my lectures, I get the sense that my language and thought processes are enmeshed in Hegel’s Beautiful Soul logic, and I cannot eschew the whole impostor notion from my mind when I realize I do not have a meta-discourse.
January 16, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Why do you find “horrifying phantasms” in the proposition that “every feeling of failure and moral guilt [you] suffer, everything [you] seem to will is nothing but the ticking away of a very complex machine” and why would such a possibility absent the possibility of “I”?
That is, I increasingly feel that autonomy and free will as they are commonly (and even critically) understood are hypostases that have little to do with the way in which consciousness manifests itself in human beings.
January 16, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Mistersqid, I was not rejecting this thesis, but relating a certain experience of the uncanny with respect to those moments where you entertain the implications of the hypothesis. Phenomenologically, at least, we experience ourselves as being agents and driving our little machines. The reason such a hypothesis– for me –produces horrifying phantasms, is that it evokes an uncanny experience where all of this is illusion but we still endure the experience of ourselves as being agents. There is something horrifying in the thought of being a sort of illusion and nonetheless having to endure ones powerness to direct oneself (because you are not pulling the reigns). However, I chose to refer to this as a “phantasm” as it also evokes certain common phantasies discussed in psychoanalysis where the analysand experiences himself as controlled from without by another. These phantasms are especially common in psychosis, but in neurosis they can manifest themselves in certain masochistic phantasies underlying the subject’s libidinal economy. The idea then would be that perhaps this sort of mechanism– which I am critical of –has a sort of libidinal dimension to it and isn’t simply a matter of an intellectual hypothesis about the nature of mind, etc.
January 17, 2008 at 1:09 am
My comments seem to be out of order… clicking in response to the wrong ones(Arendt on the burning blog post…
(Hmmm… a compulsive journal keeper for almost 50 years… have burned ten year segments, twice. Each time in a potter kiln I’d built. Blog burning would hardly match the drama… or approach the finality).
… but I think I have this one right: Richard Powers’s Echo Maker take up exactly this question: identity, neurological determinism–working with a character who displays all the symptoms of Capgras syndrome, but atypically, post traumatic.
Powers is *the* novelist of idea in our time.
January 19, 2008 at 2:52 am
What if you had steered your machine to have had a bit more breakfast? Would that have made the lecture more fluent? I’m not being sarcastic. I often find myself standing beside myself watching when I lecture & it can be disconcerting enough to make me pause & struggle for the next thought; other times, the ideas roll out of my mind & into language without effort or (much) self-consciousness. If there is a mind-body dualism in action in your lecture stumbles, why not settle back into the body’s imperatives & have something more than toast & coffee before you stand up in public?
January 19, 2008 at 3:01 am
Sure Joseph. It was a 1pm lecture and I had skipped lunch. But the post really isn’t about lecture (it was still a good lecture, I think), but about the uncanniness of experiencing oneself as run by the body. Throughout nearly the entire history of philosophy there’s a hostility towards the body. This has the status of a sort of symptom. Why does this symptom so repetitively manifest itself?
January 19, 2008 at 4:12 am
Yeah, I get that. And I’m at least minimally aware of the historical hostility toward the body in philosophy. My faux-naive question was meant to highlight that very hostility. Why don’t we learn to domesticate the body? Or, alternatively, to understand that it the body that sponsors the mind & learn to live in our bodies? I tend to the later view. I’m certainly aware of the uncanny feeling you describe — I have some version of it nearly every time I speak in public, which is what I do for a living. I think it is an effect of language, which creates a second self that looks at the self.
January 19, 2008 at 5:14 am
This is really interesting. In many respects, I tend to be very much the opposite. “I” disappear when I’m speaking– really speaking –in public. When I’m teaching or in a discussion with others, I’m no longer there, or rather this “second self” disappears(I’m not sure if you’re referring to the same thing… I’m referring to reflexivity). I suspect this is part of the reason that I suffer from such severe depression when I have vacation time. The self is redoubled in the mirror and all you can do is reflect on yourself.
January 19, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I have that vacation time thing, too, since being a talker-before-people is what I do. I should have said, perhaps, that I experience the sense of uncanniness almost each time I speak, but then banish it & become the speaking person. I forget myself — or one of my selves.