Abstract
A detailed analysis of the conceptual developments of cybernetics is provided down to the contemporary neurosciences (in particular neurophenomenology) and psychologies that stem from them. The chapter then touches upon the debate between the easy and the hard problem that monopolized the attention of scientists, philosophers, researchers, and thinkers in the late twentieth century, especially focusing on the limits of the deconstructive criticism delivered by Varela’s suggested way of approaching this dialectic.
No one can be a psychologist without being a physiologist.
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Notes
- 1.
“La traduction de Wissenschaftslehere par Doctrine de la Science est usuelle. Nous nous y confermerons donc; le terme d’epistemologie conviendrait mieux” (Hyppolite 1959, p. 36).
- 2.
“Our stance in regard to first-person methodologies is this: don’t leave home without it, but do not forget to bring along third-person accounts as well” (Varela p. 2, 1999)—such is the neurophenomenologist’s mode of operation.
- 3.
Varela stands in the tradition of Helmholtz—who, as we have seen, assigned a key role to experimentation—and shares his ontology. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, Varela—who was as seduced by Kantian ontology as Helmholtz and McCulloch—did not hesitate to suggest the possibility of bringing the inorganic to life in a laboratory.
- 4.
It is important to stress that, over the past 10 years, this epistemological opening has led to the development of a series of disciplines which combine the prefix “neuro” with a series of fields of knowledge, ranging from ethics to aesthetics, from psychoanalysis and economics to gastronomy. Unfortunately, these new disciplines lack the kind of methodological rigor which distinguishes neurophenomenology as an integral proposal for the codetermination of the two analysis perspectives: what they ultimately amount to is a kind of practice which correlates brain activity with the data of first-person experience elicited through tasks pertaining to the field chosen.
- 5.
“Rien n’indique que Francisco Varela ait fréquenté l’dealisme allemand.”
- 6.
“Un fondement absolu ne peut etre tel que s’il est à lui meme son propre objet e sa propre garantie.”
- 7.
Fichte characterizes the activity that the practical subject is supposed to ascribe to itself in order to be self-conscious as “the act of forming the concept of an intended efficacy outside us, or the concept of an end.”
- 8.
Interaction among rational beings is possible because their free agency is mediated by bodies that inhabit the same sensible world. An important step in this proof is the argument of §5 that having a body is a necessary condition of self-consciousness, since the ability to carry out one’s ends requires an immediate link between one’s will and the sensible world in which the will’s ends are to be achieved. Thus, human consciousness is necessarily embodied, and our bodies play an essential role in constituting us as rational beings (Neuhouser p. xviii, in Fichte et al. 2000).
- 9.
“Le savoir absolu, le savoir dans l’immanence, ne s’oppose pas à la richesse indéfinie de l’expérience, il montre comment cette richesse est possible; la fermature du savoir absolu n’exclut pas l’ouverture de lexperience.”
- 10.
Varela’s entire conception of mind, and ultimately of experience, is concerned with the constraints exerted by the specific phenomenology of our concrete coping upon our internal dynamics as autonomous systems, and reciprocally, the effects of the latter upon the former, in a circular framework (Rudrauf et al. 2003, p. 33).
- 11.
This I is constantly emerging and therefore constantly determinable: it represents a constant possibility of determination. It is the absolute subject of judgment. Certainly, in the light of this view, the fundamental question of the nature of the subject loses its meaning. Heidegger notes: “Sofern Subjekt als das unmittelbar und gewiß gegebene Selbst und als absolutes Urte
ilssubjekt fungiert, und diese Bestimmung einzig die Problematik des Subjekts umschreibt, heißt das: die Frage nach dem spezifischen Sinn des Subjekts als Ich wird überhaupt nicht gestellt” (“If the subject stands as the immediately and certainly given self and absolute subject of judgement, and this determination alone defines the problem of the subject, the question of the specific meaning of the subject as I does not arise at all”) (GA 28 1997, p. 121).
- 12.
“Le soi autonome valerien, comme le moi pur fichtéen, est sans dehors ou, plus precisement, c’est de l’interieur que se definit et s’esquisse pour lui un environnement, un monde comme une possibilitè de son dynamisme propre, comme ce qui a sens pour lui, c’est-à-dire comme ‘soi’.”
- 13.
“le rapport à autrui n’est jamais que rapport à soi-même.”
- 14.
“I am here and I imagine I am going there to the place where you are just now; conversely, you are here (the there where I am going to) and you imagine you are going there, to the place where I am (my here)” (Depraz in Thompson 2001, p. 173).
- 15.
Fichte’s subject has already undergone this extension, which began with Kant.
- 16.
On the other hand, understanding this ever-incomplete structure of selfhood as a self-reference means grasping it as an I-pole, which certainly has nothing to do with Heidegger’s notion of experience as always being mine.
- 17.
“Toute espèce de mort subite—Bichat writes—commence en effet par l’interruption de la circulation, de la respiration ou de l’action du cerveau.L’une de ces trois functions cesse d’abord.Toutes les autres finissent ensuite successivement;en sorte que pour exposer avec précision le phénomènes de ces genres de morts, il faut les considérer sous ces trois rapports essentiels.”
- 18.
As Huneman (2008) emphasizes, it is Kant’s theory of organisms in the third Critique—understood as an organized and self-organizing whole—that had delineated the metaphysical and epistemological context for the emergence of the new physiology.
- 19.
As we shall see in the second part of the present work, an attempt can be made to answer this question only by resorting to a privative zoology, i.e. one that understands animality by taking its lack of humanness as a starting point.
- 20.
C. Whitehead remarks: “I have nothing against the cognitive sciences, but the cognoparadigm is not only disembodied and individualistic, it is profoundly impoverished.”
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Arciero, G., Bondolfi, G., Mazzola, V. (2018). “Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus”. In: The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78087-0_3
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