Everything that has to do with the functioning of the brain fascinates us. We have assumed that the mystery of our mental life is hidden in the brain, so it seems most obvious to us that we are so passionate about its study. If in the past it was considered that the nerve center of our being was located in the heart, where even “memories” (from the Latin, cor-cordis), now we assume that everything happens in the head. Someone may say that something must remain of that ancestral understanding when we say that for important things we must follow what our heart whispers to us, but deep down we know that it is the brain connections that dictate the sentence.
As a result of this fascination with brain life, we can say that we live in times of neurolatry, a doctrine that forces anything to be explained and endorsed through neuroscience to give it authority. It is even common to find news in the daily press that reports some new neuroscientific advance related to central phenomena in our lives. This is information that quickly catches our eye because through it we aspire to clarify some of the mysteries of life that bother us so much (the circuit of love, that of empathy, that of violence or that of kindness, for example). example). News, then, through which we aspire to discover the philosophical synapse of life.
A little over a year ago, some media outlets reported on an event that is destined to substantially change our approach to the subject. It is an atlas that collects and details the knowledge about the brain evidenced by a macro-project started a few years ago that is presumed to have a great impact on the multiple derivatives related to this complex and enigmatic organ. The magnitude of the milestone may reach proportions and consequences never seen before because the only certainty we really have about the brain is that for now we do not know much about it.
World Philosophy Day is celebrated on the third Thursday of every November (this year it was last Thursday), and I believe that the anniversary is a good occasion to demand that all of us who dedicate ourselves to philosophy (and by extension all humanistic disciplines) pay more attention to the discoveries that are being made in the field of science, particularly in that of neuroscience. Sometimes it seems that we philosophy people have a certain suspicion towards this knowledge, as if there was something in it that made us feel insecure or hurt our pride, when in reality there is no reason. If neuroscience does anything, it is to broaden the debate on topics as central to philosophy as ethics, the theory of knowledge or spirituality. The danger (if it can be called that) that neurosciences monopolize the discourse and that people of philosophy and literature will be left without a voice is more a fear (if it can also be called that) than a reality . Among other things, because the importance of science and its value for society does not arise from merely scientific data.
Indeed, the value of science for a given society is based on data but is corroborated through the cultural recognition of that data. Science is also represented in our scale of values by the cultural and social validation it obtains. This is what the psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher warned Karl Jaspers a few years ago and we see it every day. In fact, one of the questions that continually arises in relation to the brain is the mystery of its plasticity, a dynamism that implies many philosophical and social questions that far exceed “mere” scientific data. Knowing why we expect so much from neuroscience, its knowledge and how that knowledge can and should impact social and personal life are issues that cannot only be answered from the microscope alone.
The human being is a form of life always to be discovered. What are we human beings? The radicality and depth of this question made the philosopher Immanuel Kant (whom this year we celebrate the tercentenary of his birth) affirm that it encompasses the rest of the great questions that, in his opinion, are on our minds: what can I know? ? what should i do? what can i expect? World Philosophy Day is also a good date to remember that even if we do not do it consciously, we are constantly questioning ourselves. And precisely because we are living in times of neurolatry, transhumanism and intelligent artifices, it becomes more urgent to thematize what homo sapiens sapiens are and what role we play in the plot of life.
Philosophy and the humanities cannot turn their backs on the experimental sciences because they would be boycotting themselves, but at the same time the experimental sciences must stand up for the many existential implications that their research entails, since the sciences are also subject to the vulnerability and contradiction of the human experience.
It is likely that we will never be able to satisfactorily answer the Kantian question of questions: in the same way that the brain modulates itself as it breathes, humanity asks itself as it walks. Everything indicates that any eventual solution to the enigma of knowing who we are will have more to do with performative action than with theoretical reflection. But not even in those do we have an excuse to stop being attentive to everything that happens in the diversity of the fields of knowledge. Both in the scientific and in the humanistic. In the end, our brain is as much about science as it is about literature, whether the bodies that house it are dedicated to the work of the microscope in the laboratory or the books in the libraries. Why tire him out with little guild battles that also distract him uselessly.
** Miquel Seguró is the author of ‘Life is also thought’ (2018) and ‘Vulnerability’ (2021).
#neuropathy #philosophy
