Ongoing Book Project: The Future History of a Non-Reductive and Non-Physicalist

Philosophical Agenda

Cengiz Erdem

Situating Neuroscience in the Context of Transcendental Realism/Materialism and Non-

Reductive Naturalism

Inferential Rationality

The question I had in mind as I was in search of funding for a research project that would
enable me to write a book on the modes in and through which the subject constitutes itself as
object of knowledge and implements new modalities of being and thinking in contemporary
philosophy and natural sciences was simply this: “How does it further our understanding of
the subject to situate neuroscience in the context of transcendental realism/materialism and
non-reductive naturalism?” The answer I have in mind to this question is that “the ideas are
objects we are embedded in and embody at once.” This ontological/epistemological principle
is the point of departure for a broader research into the developmental possibilities of a new
mode of enquiry which would put art, philosophy, and neuroscience into a more interactive
relationship with one another, driven not only by the dialectical process constitutive of the
methodological differences between natural/social sciences, art, and philosophy, but also by
the sustenance of a generative interaction between various modes of being and thinking.

Statement of Intent

My aim is to produce a book in the way of contributing to the contemporary debates between
Analytic and Continental philosophies influenced by Kant and Hegel in the context of
neuroscience. With the recent developments in neuroscience, computational linguistics and
neuroplasticity softwares it seems that Plato’s, Descartes’, Kant’s, and Hegel’s claims as to the
dual modes of being/thinking, mind/body, and self/other turned out to be more sensible and
less unrealistic than many philosophers thought they were. By way of problematising the
correlative mode constituting the triadic relationship between the dualities of being/thought,
consciousness/brain, and subject/object I intend to draw a cognitive map tracing the contours
of the current theories concerned with connecting natural sciences and humanities in general,
and neuroscience, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in particular.

What Neuroscience lacks is a cultural context, likewise what humanities and social sciences
lack is a natural basis. Situated in-between the dualities of ontology/epistemology and
phenomenology/noumenology, the goal of this project is to establish a non-reductive
interaction between neuroscience and philosophy, nature and culture, organic and inorganic,
empirical and conceptual, epistemological and ontological, transcendent and immanent, the
objective and the subjective. In the way of establishing the link which has come to be
considered missing between the mental phenomena and the physical entities, and in order to
break out of the closure not only of humanities but also of social and natural sciences, I shall
therefore attempt to establish a triadic correlation constitutive of a mode of being and thinking
subsumed under a non-reductive account of the relationship between reasons and causes,
intentions and actions, inferences and references, concepts and percepts.

Mode of Enquiry

Imagine a peculiar (and even weird) string quartet, in which each player responds by
improvisation to ideas and cues of his or her own, as well as to all kinds of sensory
cues in the environment. Since there is no score, each player would provide his or her
own characteristic tunes, but initially these various tunes would not be coordinated
with those of the other players. Now imagine that the bodies of the players are
connected to each other by myriad fine threads so that their actions and movements are
rapidly conveyed back and forth through signals of changing thread tensions that act
simultaneously to time each player’s actions. Signals that instantaneously connect the
four players would lead to a correlation of their sounds; thus, new, more cohesive, and
more integrated sounds would emerge out of the otherwise independent efforts of each
player. This correlative process would alter the next action of each player, and by these
means the process would be repeated but with new emergent tunes that were even
more correlated. Although no conductor would instruct or coordinate the group and
each player would still maintain his or her style and role, the player’s overall
productions would lead to a kind of mutually coherent music that each one acting
alone would not produce.1

The model of mind conceptualized by Gerald Edelman shows us that the mind is an embodied
and embedded substance which has the ability to adapt to changes surrounding it. 2 I intend to
use Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness to reconfigure the relationship between the
manifest and the scientific images of humanity designated by Wilfrid Sellars in relation to
Alain Badiou’s transcendence of the human animal towards the immortal subject of truth. In
both cases an intersubjective position constitutive of objectivity as a regulative idea is at
work. The rigorous disjunction introduced by Sellars and Badiou between sentience and
sapience will be investigated in conjunction with the contemporary thought embodied by and
embodying transcendental realism and materialism, embedded in and extended to a Non-
Reductive Naturalism.

By way of referring to Laruelle/Deleuze as the representatives of Non-Reductive Naturalism

on one side, and Sellars/Badiou as the representatives of Transcendental Realism/Materialism
on the other, with Kant as the vanishing mediator in-between, I hope to demonstrate, at least
in theory, that the constitutive link which has come to be considered missing between the
mental phenomena and the physical entities is actually a non-relation rather than an absence
of relation, for it is neither transcendental nor immanent to the subject but is rather the
manifestation of a purely immanent affectivity as Michel Henry puts it, intervening in the
ordinary flow of things, initiating a rupture in time as the subject itself. The subject is now in
1 Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), 49.

2 Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New
York: Basic Books, 2000), 49.
the domain of the death-drive, a concept introduced by Freud into the field of psychology
together with a paradigmatic change of the field itself into meta-psychology. This innovative
act was a consequence of Freud’s dissatisfaction with the neurobiology of his day, which did
not even ask many of the questions he had mind, let alone answer them.

The nature of this study requires an inter-/trans-/multi-disciplinary and mixed-methodological

attitude which goes beyond the opposition between merely conceptual and merely empirical
approaches. It is based on a mode of enquiry which takes its driving force from a gap that
opens paths to a new field in which various perspectives interact and constitute a theoretical
practice in order to initiate the emergence of a new subject out of the old paradigm. To
achieve this one must not only pose new questions, but also provide new answers concerning
the workings of the human brain and its interactions with the world surrounding it, out of
which the concepts of mind, consciousness, affectivity and intentionality emerge.

Conceptual Context

This project can be summed up as the investigation of the relationship between concepts,
percepts, and affects in contemporary analytic and continental philosophies of cognition,
science, and language in a psychoanalytic and neuroscientific context. To name more
exactingly the subject of this project, we shall define it as an investigation concerning the
concepts of consciousness, intention and agency in the emerging field of neurophilosophy. If
one is to embark on a journey within this new field one should be prepared to take upon
oneself the difficult task of demonstrating the existence of something, or the non-existence of
nothing, immanent to and yet transcending the physical realm as well, in turn acting upon the
matter which has caused it to emerge and become a vital force with material effects in the first
place.

If we keep in mind the Parmenidean and the Cartesian axiom that “thought is being”, it
becomes clear why, in his article on Plato, Kant, and Sellars, Brassier tries to answer the
question of how to orient ourselves towards the future in accordance with that which is not.
Against the idea that thought and being are one and the same thing, Brassier claims that
thought is non-being rather than being. Put otherwise, the correlate of thought is non-being
rather than being, being and non-being are entwined.3

Here are some theoretico-practical steps in the way of continuing to think reflectively within
and without a Kantian mode at once, a mode of thought which proceeds by modifying itself at
the same time.

Sentience: phenomenal and experiential aspects of mind (consciousness)

Sapience: psychological and functional aspects of mind (self-consciousness, awareness of

consciousness)

1) Is intentionality rooted in sentience or sapience?

3 Ray Brassier, “That Which is Not: Philosophy as Entwinement of Truth and Negativity”in Stasis, No.1 2013.
Phenomenology roots intentionality in sentience. Sellars roots intentionality in sapience, for
sentience is conditioned by our conceptual capabilities. 4 The Kantian relation between
conception and sensation is at work in the relation between the scientific and the manifest
images of human behaviour. Thinking and sensing distinction can be traced back to Kant,
sensation is a non-cognitive state with no justificatory role in empirical knowledge. Sellars’
Psychological Nominalism is a theory of the discontinuity between the organic and the
inorganic, proclaiming all awareness to be a linguistic affair.5

2) Is sensation a metaphysical affair?

Experiential consciousness has a cognitive valence. Rorty and Brandom reduce consciousness
to conceptual awareness. Conceptual consciousness is not reducible to sensation but is
constrained by it.

3) Is mind causally anchored to nature?

Dogmatic Rationalism > mind enjoys a priori cognitive access to reality, reason deduces
features of reality. For Descartes correlation between thinking and being is given.

Sceptical Empiricism > takes the intelligibility of sensory experience as given, all
knowledge is rooted in sensory experience, reason cannot access a priori knowledge of a mind
independent reality. For Hume objective correlates of sensory experience, sensations can be
intelligible.

4) Are cognitive affairs merely linguistic affairs?

Mythos and Logos = Sense and Logic > there is a transcendental difference between
thinking and knowing what is thought, sensing and knowing what is sensed.

While Brassier openly asserts that he endorses a “transcendental realism” by way of engaging
in a rigorously affirmative reading of Wilfrid Sellars’ take on the subject in comparison with
Thomas Metzinger’s “self-model theory of subjectivity”6, Adrian Johnston takes it upon
himself the task of refuting John McDowell’s theory of “first and second nature,” 7
proclaiming a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity as a Phenomenology of Spirit
for today, in the light of the recent developments in neuroscience, that is. I would like to
introduce to this ongoing discusson the concept of affect and the role of agency in relation to

4 Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in Science, Perception and Reality
(Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1991), 127-196.

5 Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero:
Ridgeview, 1991), 1-40.

6 Ray Brassier, “The View From Nowhere” ‘The View from Nowhere’ in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender,
and Culture, Vol. 8, No.2, 2011.

7 Adrian Johnston, “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds: John McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, and Hegelian-
Lacanian Materialism,” Umbr(a): The Worst [ed. Matthew Rigilano and Kyle Fetter], Buffalo: Center for the
Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture (State University of New York at Buffalo, 2011), 71-91.
the formation of concepts and percepts in and through a close analysis of the effects of the
subject’s relation to pain and suffering as well as joy and pleasure in its own self-constitutive
process. It is at this point that I intend to bring in Thomas Metzinger who is known for his
innovative research and novel output on the subject. That said, although Metzinger is an
eminent neuroscientist and philosopher of cognition, he reserves no room at all for affects in
relation to consciousness and agency in his books on the self as no one and the subject as non-
being.8 Lacking a sufficient theory of the subject as an agent acting in accordance with
rational thought, or a “rational self-consciousness” as Sellars would put it, a conception of
subjectivity as agency in the service of truth as manifestation of a dynamic real, Metzinger
remains trapped in Plato’s cave with his “phenomenal self-consciousness”, thereby failing to
give an account of how more than material subjectivity emerges from matter itself. What is
required today is a conception of self-consciousness which also includes the concepts of
affectivity and agency within the field of neurobiology, a non-reductive naturalism, that is.

Regulative Idea

In a world wherein conscious desire is absent, one cannot know what is to be done, what can
be done, and how to do it. The reduction of consciousness to physical matter deprives
humanity of the possibility of rationally intended change. The idea that intervening in the
workings of nature solely by way of that which nature presents independently of culture is to
fall into the trap one sets for oneself. It is not only necessary, but also possible to develop a
theory of self-conscious subjectivity as being aware of one’s embeddedness within one’s own
time and space. Thought can mean something only in so far as it is situated within an already
given context indeed, but for thought to mean something worthy of the name of truth it also
has to leave the old paradigm behind, change the co-oordinates, and perchance initiate a new
course of continuity in change separate from but in contiguity with the “myth of the given” at
the same time. The emergence of a “more than material subjectivity arising from matter itself”
is indeed a consciously desirable drive to sublate the very mode of being and thinking in
which the subject is embedded and embodies at once.

There is an interstitial time whereby thought takes it upon itself to transcend itself towards the
unknown. That’s where abstraction, formalisation, and visualisation take on a temporal
modality of being in and through which differential individuation and inferential rationality
constitute new normative judgments giving form and content to a new common-sense in
accordance with a general-intellect driven by the infinity of the noumenal as a regulative idea.
That’s where the thought as void consumes itself and a contraction takes place in time, giving
birth to a rupture between thought and being, a modal time-space between the past and the
present, out of which a progressively altered future continually emerges and change takes
place.

It is a matter of realising that theory and practice are always already reconciled and yet the
only way to actualise this reconciliation passes through carrying it out and across by
introducing a split between the subject of statement (the enunciated content) and the subject
8 Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
of enunciation (the formal structure in accordance with this content). In Hegel’s work this
split is introduced in such a way as to unite the mind, the brain and the world rather than
keeping them apart. It is a separation which sustains the contiguity of these three constitutive
elements of consciousness, not only as concept but also as percept and affect. The presumed
dividedness of philosophy into the analytic and the continental theories of mind, language and
cognition is not a division between different modalities of the same thing, this division is
rather between something and nothing, and therein resides a gap that splits as it unites the
physical and the metaphysical in a fashion analogous to the synapses connecting and
disconnecting the neurons in the brain.

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