Gregg D. Caruso, and Owen Flanagan, eds. Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals & Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp xviii + 372. Paper. Can. $38.65. ISBN: 978 0 19 047073 0.
Is humankind no more than a “victim of neuronal circumstances”, “just a pack of neurons”? In other words, is humankind naïve in denying epiphenomenalism, the notion that all mental processes can be reduced without remainder to brain-biology? Is existentialism’s ‘self’, a self-making born of radical commitment with its inescapable risk, finally no self at all, and the anguish pertaining to such risk no more than a neurological twitch? Is the freedom essential to existentialism (the capacity for choice that issues in self-determination) as indefensible—and ridiculous—as a denial of the law of gravity? Despite the prevalence and force of assorted determinisms that bear upon the human, has neuroscience eliminated that self-determination apart from which human agency disappears, guilt is impossible, and the criminal justice system replaced by a social engineering that re-programmes those heretofore deemed deviant?
In its exploration of and, for the most part, affinities with the above, the book identifies three kinds of existentialism. In two or three sentences it speaks of first-wave existentialism, found in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche and probing human selfhood in light of God (or, in the case of Nietzsche, of God’s absence). Again, briefly, second-wave existentialism, represented by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, is said to be a post-Holocaust attempt at creating a human authenticity (contrasted with the inauthenticity of Sartre’s “bad faith” or Heidegger’s “the herd” or even Nietzsche’s “the they”) with respect to social transformation. Third-wave existentialism, neuro-existentialism, the book’s dominating concern, avers that while neuroscience affords scientific truth concerning the brain and its functioning, it simultaneously disenchants in that it eliminates that self necessary for self-transcendence, deliberation, assessment, judgement, and uncoerced commitment.
This third wave maintains that the good, the true, and the beautiful have no meaning inasmuch as the human entity has no capacity for discerning, accessing, or discussing such: the foregoing is an illusion in that all that remains is a neuro-plexiform item whose biological complexity may be greater than that of simpler life-forms, but whose personhood is no more than seeming even as theirs is never suggested.
The book consists of four major divisions: I—Morality, Love and Emotion; II—Autonomy, Consciousness and the Self; III—Free Will, Moral Responsibility and Meaning; IV—Neuroscience and the Law.
Given the general tenor of the book, the reader is surprised initially at Maureen Sie’s chapter, “All You Need is Love(s): Exploring the Biological Platform of Morality”. Here she maintains that our nature as loving beings can explain our nature as moral beings. Throughout she borrows overtly from C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, electing to change his “charity” (agape) to “kindness” on account of her unbelief. Departing from Lewis (and from the trajectory of her argument) she introduces a discussion of oxytocin and vasopressin, hormones whose neuro-chemical properties foster attachment narrowly and sociability broadly. In light of her adducing that oxytocin can be administered through nasal spray, her argument, strong to this point on account of her use of Lewis, is weakened: the thesis she began with, our loving nature as the ground of our moral nature, is now no more than “appealing”.
Other chapters invite a profound Christian response. Jesse Prinz explores “Moral Sedimentation”, the “phenomenon of experiencing the world and acting in through the filter of the past, without necessarily realizing it.” While his proposal that sedimentation may move from mind to brain remains speculative, his chapter calls forth Christian comment on the place of spiritual formation, the place of a faith-facilitated ‘deposit’ in one’s unconscious mind that continues to assert itself even when we aren’t aware of it. Not least, his discussion of sedimentation should elicit a discussion of tradition, the manner in which the church’s tradition can be beneficent teacher or brutal tyrant, and the peril of amnesia on the part of individual, congregation, or denomination; namely, those beset with amnesia (i.e., the absence of Christian memory), lack an identity; and lacking an identity, they can never be trusted.
Oddly, in a book that largely dismisses everything that existentialism has upheld, and denies self, agency, responsibility, culpability and desert, the last chapter, “The Neuroscientific Non-Challenge to Meaning, Morals, and Purpose” by jurist Stephen J. Morse, argues compellingly so as to overturn much of the book. Morse maintains that neuroscience has not brought forward scientific grounds for a reductionism that reduces meaning, morals and purpose to mere chimera. In addition, Morse argues that the denial of self, agency, responsibility, and desert collapses human dignity, undercuts justice, and fuels social coercion. Ironically, the last sentence of the book rebukes much of the book: “As C.S. Lewis recognized long ago, (1953: “The humanitarian theory of punishment”), a system that treats people as responsible agents is ultimately more humane and respectful.”
Readers with expertise in existentialist philosophy will be disappointed to find little recognition of, and less exploration of, features essential to this philosophy. While the book purports to be an attempt at relating existentialism’s major tenets to neuroscience’s discoveries, the book is largely a reductionist dismissal of all that existentialism regards as decisive. It remains puzzling that readers are told repeatedly that self, agency, assessment, and related notions have been rendered groundless because reducible to neurological processes, when readers, on every page, are asked tacitly to assess the evidence presented, weigh the arguments adduced, evaluate the proposals for social re-structuring, and articulate consent or disagreement. What are these activities except those of a self, an agent— anything but mere synaptic firings? The title, Neuroexistentialism, appears to be a misnomer in that existentialism is mentioned only to be set aside; i.e., neurology has rendered existentialism a phantasm.
Related to the above is the book’s omission of the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness. While it is indubitable that increasingly complex neural structures and mechanisms support increasing levels of consciousness, it is also recognized that increasingly complex neural structures are quantitative, while the shift from consciousness to self-consciousness is qualitative. There is no acknowledgement of this crucial matter on the part of those contributors who are most adamant about neuro-determinism (or near neuro-determinism). There is no suggestion of any acquaintance with, for instance, Roger Penrose’s insistence that his book, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, cried out to be followed by his Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (by which he meant ‘self-consciousness’), which search remains ‘missing’ for reasons that frustrate those wedded to naturalism but not those possessed of biblical faith. The latter are aware that human beings are human, ultimately, in that they are the recipients of God’s address. According to Scripture, the characteristic of God is that God speaks. Humans, then, are characteristically those who hear (and from whom God both invites and mandates a response). God is person par excellence; humans are person inasmuch as they are ‘personned’ by the Person. Finite human self-consciousness, on this understanding, is an aspect of the image of that God who is possessed of infinite self-transcendence, and who therein allows us to know him truly and adequately yet never exhaustively.
Victor A. Shepherd
Tyndale University College & Seminary,
Toronto, Ontario