Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929)

The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism be Reconciled with Ontological Monism?" [from Philosophical Explorations]

March, 2007

"This fiction [of the self] gets replaced with the image of a consciousness that hangs like a marionette from an inscrutable crisscross of strings."

Freud's discovery of the unconscious could also still be seen as empancipatory at the time, because a successful analysis of unconsciously influential motives was supposed to make it possible to expand one's range of reflection and self-direction: 'where id was, there ego shall be.' Neuroscientific enlightenment about the illusion of free will crosses the conceptual border into self-objectification, as is clear from the opposite reaction that it sets in motion. For this shift in the naturalization of the mind dissolves the perspective from which alone an increase in knowledge could be experienced as emancipation from constraints. The collapse of the fiction of the 'self' destroys the very referent, the 'self' of any revisionary self-description. This fiction gets replaced with the image of a consciousness that hangs like a marionette from an inscrutable crisscross of strings: 'We can't possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine' (Wegner 2002, 27).
(p. 24)

Uncategorized::Marionette

Reading Ray Brassier's "The View from Nowhere" in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture, 8:2 (Summer 2011): 12.

Habermas, Jürgen, "The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism be Reconciled with Ontological Monism?" Philosophical Explorations 10:1 (March 2007): 13-50.

04/15/2013