Abstract
The growing field of neuro-philosophy throws up important issues for our society about how we understand the persistence of personal identity over time: if my brain is damaged or otherwise altered, do I become a different person? This chapter explores some of the work of the French neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou as she asks, and tries to answer, this fundamental question about who we think we are, giving a non-reductive materialist account of self-identity. I argue that Malabou has implicit within her writing the seeds of a more adequate account which would not understand identity and personhood to be immanent to the material brain but would embrace a broader notion of identity distributed across relationships, institutions, and shared common narratives.
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Notes
- 1.
Malabou’s main engagements with neuroscience are to be found in: What Should We Do With Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), hereafter WSD; La Chambre du milieu: de Hegel aux neurosciences (Paris: Editions Hermann, 2009), ‘Les nouveaux blessées : Psychanalyse, neurologie et plasticité’ (Les conférences d’AGORA, Orange, France, Friday 19 October 2007, available at psychanalyse.com), The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), hereafter: TNW; Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), hereafter OA; Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), hereafter: SEL; and Avant demain. Epigenèse et rationalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014).
- 2.
- 3.
In What Should We Do With Our Brain? destructive plasticity is introduced as the fourth, and hitherto unheard of, form of neural plasticity after developmental plasticity, modulational plasticity, and reparative plasticity (WSD, 68–70).
- 4.
Quoted in TNW, 16. There is some controversy about the reconstructions of the Gage case, meticulously chronicled and critiqued in Malcolm Macmillan’s An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage (2002), running to 562 pages. Macmillan concludes that only a few 100 lines by Harlow bear reliable testimony to Gage, leading David Evans to note “the absence of any of the contradictory or wilful behaviour such as that claimed for the post-injury Gage by Damasio, Changeux and Angier” (Evans 2006, 172–3). It is not my purpose in treating the Gage case in this context to establish at each point the veracity of the claims being made; my concern is to highlight the tensions and problems which attend Malabou’s notion of the self and the person, and these obtain whether or not Damasio’s reconstruction of the case, upon which she relies, is accurate.
- 5.
SEL, 28; this is author’s emphasis. Quoting Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective (2002, 52).
- 6.
This is the position taken by Malabou herself when she claims that “The accident appears to be the plastic explosion that erases any trace and every memory , and that destroys any archive” (SEL, 58). This was indeed the testimony of physician Harlow, but it was, it appears, the testimony of Gage himself. Commenting on the extant documents surrounding the Gage case, David Evans notes that:
It was never Gage who complained of feeling so thoroughly different that he must be considered as another, stranger kind of person than he had been used to being. It was third parties, work colleagues as reported by a physician , who commented that he could no longer be considered to be Gage. (Evans 2006, 177)
- 7.
Adrian Johnston shares this concern in his preface to Self and Emotional Life . However, like Malabou, he understands the brain as the sole and exclusive locus of identity and personhood:
It seems implausible to me that myriad conscious and unconscious elements of his complex ontogenetic life history predating the trauma , elements distributed across many more still-functioning regions of his brain than just the wounded left Frontal lobe, abruptly ceased to play any explicable role whatsoever in his existence in the aftermath of the event. (SEL, xiv)
For Johnston, the issue is that only a part of Gage’s brain has been destroyed and the rest of it, continuing to function, should guarantee the continuity of identity. For the purposes of my argument in this section, Johnston and Malabou are taking the same “host substance” position.
- 8.
Fernando Vidal, “Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity ,” (2009, 7). The Essay is frequently evoked in relation to contemporary neurological discourse, and my treatment of Locke in this paragraph is particularly indebted both to this article and to Vidal’s 2002 article “Brains , bodies, selves, and science : anthropologies of identity and the resurrection of the body.”
- 9.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth’” (Genesis 1:26, English Standard Version 2009).
- 10.
I was helped in my reading of Pico by April Capili’s “‘Hidden Keynote’ in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Understanding Of Human Dignity And Freedom”, Philosophia 38 (2): 196–208.
- 11.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola , Oration on the Dignity of Man, 117, this author’s emphasis. As Capili points out, this argument is also made by Paul Miller (1998, xv).
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Watkin, C. (2017). If My Brain Is Damaged, Do I Become a Different Person? Catherine Malabou and Neuro-identity. In: Monk, N., Lindgren, M., McDonald, S., Pasfield-Neofitou, S. (eds) Reconstructing Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58427-0_2
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