Abstract
The theories I have discussed have, directly or indirectly, had an enormous influence on contemporary thought about what it is to be human. They have in common a tendency to discredit the notion of the self-possessed individual choosing at least some aspects of his or her life, and to downplay the role of conscious decision-making, deliberation, and indeed consciousness itself, in everyday life and behaviour. A specific consequence of this is a sceptical attitude towards the role of reason in personal and public life — in behaviour tout court. My avowed reasons for actions or beliefs or principles are taken to be rooted in self-deception or self-misrecognition: they are mere rationalisations of behaviour whose true origin lies in some place hidden from me. According to Marxist thinking, the hidden hand that shapes my behaviour — my political beliefs, my sense of morality, my choice of ends in life — is a largely unconscious, historically determined class consciousness, created by the objective conditions of production. For Durkheim and his sociological successors, the hidden hand is the society to which I belong and whose larger outline and deepest tendency is concealed from me. For the Freudians, the ultimate source of my behaviour is to be found in the asocial instincts refracted through the ancient repressive structures of civilisation — an origin I could not fully acknowledge, even if it were revealed to me.
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Notes and References
This phrase derives, I think, from PaulRicoeur. I am here borrowing it from David Lehman’s brilliant Signs of t he Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (London: André Deutsch, 1991). I cannot resist quoting his comment about literary criticism in the ‘age of suspicion’:
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 18.
Joel Handler, Presidential Address to the Law and Society Association in Law and Society Review 26(4) (1992): 697–731, at pp. 697–8.
The reader is referred to chapter 3, ‘Magic and Science’, and to my Newton’s Sleep (London: Macmillan, 1995), where the Strong Sociology of Knowledge is criticised. This critique was in part based upon Lewis Wolpert’s excellent The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992).
For a further examination of this problem of specification-by-rules (with an incomplete understanding of its devastating implications for his own theories), see Daniel Dennett, ‘Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI’, in Christopher Hookway, ed., Minds, Machines, Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also my discussion in The Explicit Animal, pp. 223–6. The experience of the imaginary anthropologist, incidentally, should cast doubt on what Althusser (op. cit, p. 24) describes as ‘the golden rule of materialism’: ‘never judge a being by its consciousness of itself’. I am afraid that a statistical, objective analysis of my greeting behaviour and that of a large group of individuals considered to belong to the same class as myself would yield no insights into why, with what purpose, or what feelings, I greeted, or failed to greet, anyone on a particular occasion. You would have to know a fantastic amount about me really to know why.
Ironically, this distance between language and experienced reality has been used as an argument to support the idea that language does not make contact with the world and that discourse is, therefore, a sealed system that refers only to itself. At the same time, discourse theorists overlook actual experience as that which informs, subverts, acts as a critical check upon, the world of discourse. See Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism (London: Edward Arnold, 1988).
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© 1997 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (1997). Recovering the Conscious Agent. In: Enemies of Hope. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371569_11
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